thiy 
June 



March 7, 1900 



Number 141 
PS 1927 "^ 

1900 
Copy 1 











THREE 
OUTDOOR PAPERS 



BY 



T. W. HIGGINSON 



WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



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tEtlje ISiiJcrstoe literature ^ttiti 



THREE OUTDOOR PAPERS 



BY 



THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 



WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 



AND AN INDEX OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS 
MENTIONED 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

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CONTENTS 



FAQE 

iii 



Biographical Sketch 

I. The Procession of the Flowers . . 1 

II. April Days 31 

III. Water-Lilies 65 

Index of Plants and Animals mentioned . . 97 



57963 

Copyright, 1889, 
By lee and SHEPARD. 

Copyright, 1897, 
By LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 

Copyright, 1900, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



SECOND COPY. 

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The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
fileotrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 

MR. STEPHEN HIGGINSON, JR., a 
Boston merchant, himself the son of 
another Boston merchant, who served in the 
Continental Congress, and descended from 
one of the earliest founders of the colony of 
Massachusetts Bay, was appointed, after he 
had passed middle life, to the stewardship 
of Harvard College. This office, now known 
as that of the bursar, required him to live in 
Cambridge, and represent the treasurer of the 
college in immediate connection with the stu- 
dent body. Accordingly he removed with his 
large family to Cambridge, and there was 
born, December 22, 1823, the youngest of his 
fifteen children, Thomas Wentworth Higgin- 
son. 

In his delightful volume of personal remi- 
niscences, CJicerfzd Yesterdays, Mr. Higgin- 
son has given a narrative of his youth and 
training in the college community, then a 
quiet, isolated country society ; for Cambridge 
was separated from Boston by a wide river, 
and broad stretches of marshland on its banks 
increased the separation. A leisurely omni- 
iii 



Biographical Sketch 

bus once an hour picked up the few passen- 
gers who wished or needed to go to town, but 
for the most part Cambridge was a contented 
village, having its rustic life blended with the 
cultivated, serene life of the academic circle ; 
and the boys and girls who grew up together 
in the neighborhood found their pleasure half 
in books, half in that familiar intercourse with 
nature which is invited when the country 
beckons at the end of the village street. 

The effect of this training is well seen in 
the character of Mr. Higginson's writing. 
The tastes formed in youth have been culti- 
vated throughout his life, under all sorts of 
conditions, and the three papers which are 
gathered in this collection show that intimate 
acquaintance with the country on the edge 
of which he lived, and into which he made 
endless incursions, whether from Cambridge 
or Newburyport or Worcester or Newport. 
The index at the close gives the names of 
plants and animals mentioned. It would not 
be an idle exercise for one to make a similar 
index of authors casually referred to ; and as 
one read over the names of Horace, Euri- 
pides, Homer, Virgil, among the ancients, 
Chaucer, Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Izaak 
Walton, among the early English worthies, 
Humboldt and Gray and Harris, among the 
iv 



Biographical Sketch 

men of science, Scott, Emerson, Thoreau, 
Longfellow, Whittier, Wordsworth, Fred- 
rika Bremer, Hawthorne, Goethe, Tennyson, 
Holmes, Susan Fenimore Cooper, among those 
fairly contemporary with the author himself, 
one might fancy for a moment that this was 
a bookish study of nature, but on looking 
closer would see how literature was the other 
lung with which this writer breathed, and that 
nature at first hand and nature as seen in 
poets and men of science so blended in his 
observation and reflection as to make but one 
image to the soul. 

In his college life he was the youngest in 
his class but the second in rank, and he en- 
tered the active life of the world well equipped 
as to scholarship and with a mind quick to 
appropriate the new ideas which came hurry- 
ing into the ports of Boston and Cambridge 
on every breeze. It was the day when enthu- 
siastic folk thought the world was to be swept 
fresh and clean with all the new brooms of 
reform ; and the staid, decorous community, 
which knew little of the extremes that marked 
society in other parts of the world, was set 
upon by the advance agents of communism, 
total abstinence, abolitionism, and religious in- 
dividualism, and bidden throw away its idols 
and worship at the only true shrine. Mr. 



Biographical Sketch 

Higginson had already made himself some- 
thing more than an amateur naturalist ; he 
now taught school a little, but presently found 
himself very easily in the Divinity School of 
his college, making ready to be a minister, 
and during the few years of his pulpit service, 
becoming more and more absorbed in the one 
commanding moral revolution which was for 
upheaving American society. 

He has himself told how he took part in 
the agitation for abolition, and was for ex- 
changing his pastoral crook for a musket when 
it almost looked as if the first battle between 
the two forces was to be fought in Boston 
streets ; he had a share also in the colonizing 
movement which led to the actual preliminary 
fight in Kansas, and when the war for the 
Union finally did break out, he stepped down 
from the pulpit, laid aside his scholar's gown, 
and put on the habit of a soldier. From that 
day he ceased to be the Rev. Mr. Higginson, 
— a name well known by this time in anti- 
slavery circles, — and shortly became Colonel 
Higginson, a title which he has ever since 
retained. He led a regiment of blacks in 
South Carolina, and he has told the story of 
those historic days in his book, Army Life 
in a Black Regiment. 

Meanwhile, lecturing had made him a 
vi 



Biographical Sketch 

preacher between Sundays, and his love of 
literature and of nature had led him down 
some new lanes on his way to the goals to- 
ward which Reform pointed. He was im- 
pressed, as so many were, by the disabilities 
of women, and he wrote that effective paper, 
whose title was itself an argument, ''Ought 
Women to learn the Alphabet ? " He knew 
what nature did for the healthy man, and he 
wrote another paper, entitled " Saints and 
their Bodies," and these two papers headed a 
long succession of articles relating to educa- 
tion, the widening of the woman's world, and 
the better understanding of the beautiful 
world in which we live. A long residence at 
Newport in Rhode Island led to a series of 
delightful sketches to which he gave the name 
of Oldport Days, and to a romance entitled 
Malbone. He gathered his papers into vol- 
umes from time to time, and added also a 
volume of poems. 

It is not surprising that one who had taken 
so strong an interest in American public life, 
and was so active in educational matters, 
should seek to break down the formal, unin- 
teresting study of American history by writ- 
ing a book which should show young people 
how alive history was, and his Young Folks 
History of the United States was a pioneer 
vii 



Biographical Sketch 

in the field of fresh, readable school-books. 
This animated survey of national growth has 
enjoyed great popularity from its first publi- 
cation, and many who caught their first love 
of history from the book were grown men 
when they read his Larger History of the 
United States of America to the Close of Pre- 
sident Jackson's A dniinistration. 

Colonel Higginson has taken an active part 
in public life. He has been a member of the 
Massachusetts State Board of Education, and 
a representative to the General Court of the 
same State, and no great discussion of national 
policy has failed to call out contributions from 
him either on the platform or through the 
press. About twenty years ago he returned 
to the city of his birth, and has since made 
his home there. One of the latest of his 
books, Old Cambridge, is a graceful sketch 
of the literary associations of that university 
town. His remembrances gave special force 
to his characterizations, but had any one else 
written the book. Colonel Higginson himself 
would have been a prominent figure in the 
group described. 

H. E. S. 



vm 



THE PROCESSION OF THE 
FLOWERS 



I 



THE PROCESSION OF THE 
FLOWERS 

IN Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose 
multitudinous crimson flowers are so se- 
ductive to the humming-birds that they hover 
all day around it, buried in its blossoms until 
petal and wing seem one. At first upright, 
the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall 
unwithered to the ground, and are thence 
called by the Creoles " Cupid's Tears." Fred- 
rika Bremer relates that daily she brought 
home handfuls of these blossoms to her 
chamber, and nightly they all disappeared. 
One morning she looked toward the wall of 
the apartment, and there, in a long crimson 
line, the delicate flowers went ascending one 
by one to the ceiling, and passed from sight. 
She found that each was borne laboriously 
onward by a little colorless ant much smaller 
than itself: the bearer was invisible, but the 
lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty. 
3 



The Procession of the Flowers 

To a watcher from the sky, the march of 
the flowers of any zone across the year would 
seem as beautiful as that West-Indian pa- 
geant. These frail creatures, rooted where 
they stand, a part of the *' still life " of Nature, 
yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most 
sultry silence of summer noons, the vital cur- 
rent is coursing with desperate speed through 
the innumerable veins of every leaflet, and 
the apparent stillness, like the sleeping of a 
child's top, is in truth the very ecstasy of 
perfected motion. 

Not in the tropics only, but even in Eng- 
land, whence most of our floral associations 
and traditions come, the march of the flowers 
is in an endless circle, and, unlike our expe- 
rience, something is always in bloom. In the 
Northern United States, it is said, the active 
growth of most plants is condensed into ten 
weeks, while in the mother country the full 
activity is maintained through sixteen. But 
even the English winter does not seem to be 
a winter, in the same sense as ours, appear- 
ing more like a chilly and comfortless au- 
tumn. There is no month in the English 
year when some special plant does not 
bloom : the Colt's-foot there opens its fra- 
grant flowers from December to February; 
4 



The Procession of the Flowers 

the yellow-flowered Hellebore, and its cousin, 
the sacred Christmas Rose of Glastonbury, 
extend from January to March; and the 
Snowdrop and Primrose often come before 
the first of February. Something may be 
gained, much lost, by that perennial succes- 
sion ; those links, however slight, must make 
the floral period continuous to the imagina- 
tion ; while our year gives a pause and an 
interval to its children, and after exhausted 
October has effloresced into Witch-Hazel, 
there is an absolute reserve of blossom until 
the Alders wave again. 

No symbol could so well represent Nature's 
first yielding in spring-time as this blossom- 
ing of the Alder, the drooping of the tresses 
of these tender things. Before the frost is 
gone, and while the new-born season is yet 
too weak to assert itself by actually uplifting 
anything, it can at least let fall these blos- 
soms, one by one, till they wave defiance to 
the winter on a thousand boughs. How pa- 
tiently they have waited ! Men are perplexed 
with anxieties about their own immortality; 
but these catkins, which hang, almost full- 
formed, above the ice all winter, show no 
such solicitude, though when March wooes 
them they are ready. Once relaxing, their 
5 



The Procession of the Flowers 

pollen is so prompt to fall that it sprinkles 
your hand as you gather them ; then, for one 
day, they are the perfection of grace upon 
your table, and next day they are weary and 
emaciated, and their little contribution to the 
spring is done. 

Then many eyes watch for the opening of 
the May-flower, day by day, and a few for 
the Hepatica. So marked and fantastic are 
the local preferences of all our plants, that, 
with miles of woods and meadows open to 
their choice, each selects only some few 
spots for its accustomed abodes, and some 
one among them all for its very earliest blos- 
soming. There is often a single chosen nook, 
which you might almost cover with your 
handkerchief, where each flower seems to 
bloom earliest without variation, year by 
year. I know one such place for Hepatica 
a mile northeast, — another for May-flower 
two miles southwest; and each year the 
whimsical creature is in bloom on that little 
spot when not another flower can be found 
open through the whole country round. Ac- 
cidental as the choice may appear, it is un- 
doubtedly based on laws more eternal than 
the stars ; yet why all subtle influences con- 
spire to bless that undistinguishable knoll no 
6 



The Procession of the Flowers 

man can say. Another and similar puzzle 
offers itself in the distribution of the tints of 
flowers, — in these two species among the 
rest. There are certain localities, near by, 
where the Hepatica is all but white, and 
others where the May-flower is sumptuous in 
pink; yet it is not traceable to wet or dry, 
sun or shadow, and no agricultural chemistry 
can disclose the secret. Is it by some Dar- 
winian law of selection that the white Hepat- 
ica has utterly overpowered the blue, in our 
Cascade Woods, for instance, while yet in 
the very midst of this pale plantation a single 
clump will sometimes bloom with all heaven 
on its petals? Why can one recognize the 
Plymouth May-flower, as soon as seen, by its 
wondrous depth of color? Perhaps it blushes 
with triumph to see how Nature has outwitted 
the Pilgrims, and has even succeeded in pre- 
serving her deer like an English duke, since 
she still maintains the deepest woods in Mas- 
sachusetts precisely where those sturdy immi- 
grants first began their clearings. 

The Hepatica (called also Liverwort, Squir- 
rel-Cup, or Blue Anemone) has been found 
in Worcester as early as March seventeenth, 
and in Danvers on March twelfth, — r dates 
which appear almost the extreme of credibil- 
7 



The Procession of the Flowers 

ity. Our next wild-flower in this region is 
the Claytonia, or Spring-Beauty, which is 
common in the Middle States, but here found 
in only a few localities. It is the Indian Mis- 
kodced, and was said to have been left behind 
when mighty Peboan, the Winter, was melted 
by the breath of Spring. It is an exquisitely 
delicate little creature, bears its blossoms in 
clusters, unlike most of the early species, and 
opens in gradual succession each white and 
pink-veined bell. It grows in moist places 
on the sunny edges of woods, and prolongs 
its shy career from about the tenth of April 
until almost the end of May. 

A week farther into April, and the Blood- 
root opens, — a name of guilt, and a type of 
innocence. This fresh and lovely thing ap- 
pears to concentrate all its stains within its 
ensanguined root, that it may condense all 
purity in the peculiar whiteness of its petals. 
It emerges from the ground with each shy 
blossom wrapped in its own pale-green leaf, 
then dofifs the cloak and spreads its long 
petals round a group of yellow stamens. The 
flower falls apart so easily, that when in full 
bloom it will hardly bear transportation, but 
with a touch the stem stands naked, a bare, 
gold-tipped sceptre amid drifts of snow. And 
8 



The Procession of the Flowers 

the contradiction of its hues seems carried 
into its habits. One of the most shy of wild 
plants, easily banished from its locality by 
any invasion, it yet takes to the garden with 
unpardonable readiness, doubles its size, blos- 
soms earlier, repudiates its love of water, and 
flaunts its great leaves in the unnatural con- 
finement, until it elbows out the exotics. Its 
charm is gone, unless one find it in its native 
haunts, beside some cascade which streams 
over rocks that are dark with moisture, green 
with moss, and snowy with white bubbles. 
Each spray of dripping feather-moss exudes 
a tiny torrent of its own, or braided with 
some tiny neighbor, above the little water- 
fonts which sleep sunless in ever-verdant 
caves. Sometimes along these emerald 
canals there comes a sudden rush and hurry, 
as if some anxious housekeeper upon the-hill 
above were afraid that things were not stir- 
ring fast enough, — and then again the wav- 
ing and sinuous lines of water are quieted to 
a serener flow. The delicious red thrush and 
the busy little yellow-throat are not yet come 
to this their summer haunt; but all day long 
the answering field-sparrows trill out their 
sweet, shy, accelerating lay. 

In the same localities with the Bloodroot, 
9 



The Procession of the Flowers 

though some days later, grows the Dog-Tooth 
Violet, — a name hopelessly inappropriate, 
but likely never to be changed. These hardy 
and prolific creatures have also many local- 
ities of their own ; for, though they do not 
acquiesce in cultivation, like the sycophantic 
Bloodroot, yet they are hard to banish from 
their native haunts, but linger after the woods 
are cleared and the meadow drained. The 
bright flowers blaze back all the yellow light 
of noonday, as the gay petals curl and spread 
themselves above their beds of mottled leaves ; 
but it is always a disappointment to gather 
them, for indoors they miss the full ardor of 
the sunbeams, and are apt to go to sleep and 
nod expressionless from the stalk. 

And almost on the same day with this 
bright apparition one may greet a multitude 
of concurrent visitors, arriving so accurately 
together that it is almost a matter of accident 
which of the party shall first report himself 
Perhaps the Dandelion should have the earli- 
est place ; indeed, I once found it in Brook- 
line on the seventh of April. But it cannot 
ordinarily be expected before the twentieth, 
in Eastern Massachusetts, and rather later in 
the interior ; while by the same date I have 
also found near Boston the Cowslip, or 

lO 



The Procession of the Flowers 

Marsh-Marigold, the Spring-Saxifrage, the 
Anemones, the Violets, the Bellwort, the 
Houstonia, the Cinquefoil, and the Straw- 
berry-blossom. Varying, of course, in differ- 
ent spots and years, the arrival of this coterie 
is yet nearly simultaneous, and they may all 
be expected hereabouts before May-day at 
the very latest. After all, in spite of the 
croakers, this festival could not have been 
much better timed ; for the delicate blossoms 
which mark the period are usually in perfec- 
tion on this day, and it is not long before 
they are past their prime. 

Some early plants which have now almost 
disappeared from Eastern Massachusetts are 
still found near Worcester in the greatest 
abundance, — as the larger Yellow Violet, 
the Red Trillium, the dwarf Ginseng, the 
Clintonia or Wild Lily-of-the-Valley, and the 
pretty fringed Polygala, which Miss Cooper 
christened " Gay- Wings." Others, again, are 
now rare near Worcester, and growing rarer, 
though still abundant a hundred miles farther 
inland. In several bits of old, swampy wood 
one may still find, usually close together, the 
Hobble-Bush and the Painted Trillium, the 
Mitella, or Bishop's-Cap, and the snowy Tia- 
rella. Others still have entirely vanished 



II 



The Procession of the Flowers 

within ten years, and that in some cases with- 
out any adequate explanation. The dainty 
white Corydalis, profanely called *' Dutch- 
man's Breeches," and the quaint, woolly 
Ledum, or Labrador Tea, have disappeared 
within that time. The beautiful Linnaea is 
still found annually, but flowers no more ; as 
is also the case, in all but one distant locality, 
with the once abundant Rhododendron. 
Nothing in Nature has for me a more fasci- 
nating interest than these secret movements of 
vegetation, — the sweet, blind instinct with 
which flowers cling to old domains until ab- 
solutely compelled to forsake them. How 
touching is the fact, now well known, that 
salt-water plants still flower beside the Great 
Lakes, yet dreaming of the time when those 
waters were briny as the sea ! Nothing in 
the demonstrations of Geology seems grander 
than the light lately thrown by Professor 
Gray, from the analogies between the flora of 
Japan and of North America, upon the suc- 
cessive epochs of heat which led the wander- 
ing flowers along the Arctic lands, and of 
cold which isolated them once more. Yet 
doubtless these humble movements of our 
local plants may be laying up results as 
important, and may hereafter supply evi- 

12 



The Procession of the Flowers 

dence of earth's changes upon some smaller 
scale. 

May expands to its prime of beauty ; the 
summer birds come with the fruit-blossoms, 
the gardens are deluged with bloom, and the 
air with melody, while in the woods the timid 
spring flowers fold themselves away in silence 
and give place to a brighter splendor. On 
the margin of some quiet swamp a myriad of 
bare twigs seem suddenly overspread with 
purple butterflies, and we know that the Rho- 
dora is in bloom. Wordsworth never immor- 
talized a flower more surely than Emerson 
this, and it needs no weaker words ; there is 
nothing else in which the change from naked- 
ness to beauty is so sudden, and when you 
bring home the great mass of blossoms they 
appear all ready to flutter away again from 
your hands and leave you disenchanted. 

At the same time the beautiful Cornel-tree 
is in perfection ; startling as a tree of the 
tropics, it flaunts its great flowers high up 
among the forest-branches, intermingling its 
long, slender twigs with theirs, and garnishing 
them with alien blooms. It is very available 
for household decoration, with its four great, 
creamy petals, — flowers they are not, but 
floral involucres, — each with a fantastic curl 
13 



The Procession of the Flowers 

and stain at its tip, as if the fire-flies had 
ahghted on them and scorched them ; and 
yet I like it best as it peers out in barbaric 
splendor from the delicate green of young 
Maples. And beneath it grows often its 
more abundant kinsman, the Dwarf Cornel, 
with the same four great petals enveloping its 
floral cluster, but lingering low upon the 
ground, — an herb whose blossoms mimic 
the statelier tree. 

The same rich, creamy hue and texture 
show themselves in the Wild Calla, which 
grows at this season in dark, sequestered 
watercourses, and sometimes well rivals, in 
all but size, that superb whiteness out of a 
land of darkness, the Ethiopic Calla of the 
conservatory. At this season, too, we seek 
another semi-aquatic rarity, whose homely 
name cannot deprive it of a certain garden- 
like elegance, the Buckbean (^Mcnyantlics 
trifoliatd). This is one of the shy plants 
which yet grow in profusion within their own 
domain. I have found it of old in Cambridge, 
and then upon the pleasant shallows of the 
Artichoke, that loveliest tributary of the Mer- 
rimack, and I have never seen it where it oc- 
cupied a patch more than a few yards square, 
while yet within that space the multitudinous 
14 



The Procession of the Flowers 

spikes ^row always tall and close, reminding 
one of Hyacinths, when in perfection, but 
more delicate and beautiful. The only lo- 
cality I know for it in this vicinity lies seven 
miles away, where a little inlet from the lower, 
winding bays of Lake Quinsigamond goes 
stealing up among a farmer's hay-fields, and 
there, close beside the public road and in full 
view of the farm-house, this rare creature fills 
the water. But to reach it we commonly row 
down the lake to a sheltered lagoon, separated 
from the main lake by a long island, which is 
gradually forming itself like the coral isles, 
growing each year denser with alder thickets 
where the king-birds build ; — there we leave 
the boat among the lily-leaves, and take a 
lane which winds among the meadows and 
gives a fitting avenue for the pretty thing we 
seek. It is not safe to vary many days from 
the twentieth of May, for the plant is not long 
in perfection, and is past its prime when the 
lower blossoms begin to wither on the stem. 

But should we miss this delicate adjustment 
of time, it is easy to console ourselves with 
bright armfuls of Lupine, which bounteously 
flowers for six weeks along our lakeside, rang- 
ing from the twenty-third of May to the sixth 
of July. The Lupine is one of our most 
15 



The Procession of the Flowers 

travelled plants; for, though never seen off 
the American continent, it stretches to the 
Pacific, and is found upon the Arctic coast. 
On these banks of Lake Quinsigamond it 
grows in great families, and should be gath- 
ered in masses and placed in a vase by itself; 
for it needs no relief from other flowers, its 
own soft leaves afford background enough, 
and though the white variety rarely occurs, 
yet the varying tints of blue upon the same 
stalk are a perpetual gratification to the eye. 
I know not why shaded blues should be so 
beautiful in flowers, and yet avoided as dis- 
tasteful in ladies' fancy-work ; but it is a mys- 
tery like that which long repudiated blue and 
green from all well-regulated costumes, while 
Nature yet evidently prefers it to any other 
combination in her wardrobe. 

Another constant ornament of the end of 
May is the large pink Lady's-Slipper, or 
Moccason-Flower, the " Cypripedium not due 
till to-morrow," which Emerson attributes to 
the note-book of Thoreau, — to-morrow, in 
these parts, meaning about the twentieth of 
May. It belongs to the family of Orchids, a 
high-bred race, fastidious in habits, sensitive 
as to abodes. Of the ten species named as 
rarest among American endogenous plants by 
i6 



The Procession of the Flowers 

Dr. Gray, in his valuable essay on the statis- 
tics of our northern flora, all but one are 
Orchids. Even an abundant species, like the 
present, retains the family traits in its person, 
and never loses its high-born air and its deli- 
cate veining. I know a grove where it can be 
gathered by the hundred within a half-acre, 
and yet I never can divest myself of the feel- 
ing that each specimen is a choice novelty. 
But the actual rarity occurs, at least in this 
region, when one finds the smaller and more 
beautiful Yellow Moccason-Flower, — Cypri- 
pedium parviflorum, — which accepts only 
our very choicest botanical locality, the 
*' Rattlesnake Ledge " on Tatessit Hill, and 
may, for aught I know, have been the very 
plant which Elsie Venner laid upon her 
schoolmistress's desk. 

June is an intermediate month between the 
spring and summer flowers. Of the more 
delicate early blossoms, the Dwarf Cornel, 
the Solomon's-Seal, and the Yellow Violet 
still linger in the woods, but rapidly make 
way for larger masses and more conspicuous 
hues. The meadows are gorgeous with Clover, 
Buttercups, and Wild Geranium ; but Nature 
is a little chary for a week or two, maturing 
a more abundant show. Meanwhile one may 
17 



The Procession of the Flowers 

afford to take some pains to search for an- 
other rarity, almost disappearing from this 
region, — the lovely Pink Azalea. It still 
grows plentifully in a few sequestered places, 
selecting woody swamps to hide itself; and 
certainly no shrub suggests, when found, 
more tropical associations. Those great, 
nodding, airy, fragrant clusters, tossing far 
above one's head their slender cups of honey, 
seem scarcely to belong to our sober zone, 
any more than the scarlet tanagcr which 
sometimes builds its nest beside them. They 
appear' bright exotics, which have wandered 
into our woods, and arc too happy to feel 
any wish for exit. And just as they fade, 
their humble sister in white begins to bloom, 
and carries on through the summer the same 
intoxicating fragrance. 

But when June is at its height, the sculp- 
tured chalices of the Mountain Laurel begin 
to unfold, and thenceforward, for more than 
a month, extends the reign of this our wood- 
land queen. I know not why one should 
sigh after the blossoming gorges of the Him- 
alaya, when our forests are all so crowded 
with this glowing magnificence, — rounding 
the tangled swamps into smoothness, lighting 
up the underwoods, overtopping the pastures, 
i8 



The Procession of the Flowers 

lining the rural lanes, and rearing its great, 
pinkish masses till they meet overhead. The 
color ranges from the purest white to a per- 
fect rose-pink, and there is an inexhaustible 
vegetable vigor about the whole thing which 
puts to shame those tenderer shrubs that 
shrink before the progress of cultivation. 
There is the Rhododendron, for instance, 
a plant of the same natural family with the 
Laurel and the Azalea, and looking more 
robust and woody than either ; it once grew 
in many localities in this region, and still lin- 
gers in a few, without consenting either to 
die or to blossom. There is only one remote 
place from which any one now brings into 
our streets those large, luxuriant flowers, 
waving white above the dark green leaves, 
and bearing " just a dream of sunset on their 
edges, and just a breath from the green sea 
in their hearts." The Laurel, on the other 
hand, maintains its ground, imperturbable and 
almost impassable, on every hillside, takes no 
hints, suspects no danger, and nothing but 
the most unmistakable onset from spade or 
axe can diminish its profusion. Gathering it 
on the most lavish scale seems only to serve 
as wholesale pruning; nor can I conceive 
that the Indians, who once ruled over this 
19 



The Procession of the Flowers 

whole country from Wigwam Hill, could ever 
have found it more inconveniently abundant 
than now. We have perhaps no single spot 
where it grows in such perfect picturesque- 
ness as at '* The Laurels," on the Merrimack, 
just above Newburyport, — a whole hillside 
scooped out and the hollow piled solidly with 
flowers, and pines curving around it above, 
and the river encircling it below, on which 
your boat glides along, while you look up 
through ghnimering arcades of bloom. But 
for the last half of June it monopolizes every- 
thing in the Worcester woods, — no one picks 
anything else ; and it fades so slowly that I 
have found a perfect blossom on the last day 
of July. 

At the same time with this royalty of the 
woods, the queen of the water ascends her 
throne, for a reign as undisputed and far 
more prolonged. The extremes of the 
Water-Lily in this vicinity, so far as I have 
known, are the eighteenth of June and the 
thirteenth of October, — a longer range than 
belongs to any other conspicuous wild-flower, 
unless we except the Dandelion and Hous- 
tonia. It is not only the most fascinating of 
all flowers to gather, but more available for 
decorative purposes than almost any other, 

20 



The Procession of the Flowers 

if it can only be kept fresh. The best method 
for this purpose, I believe, is to cut the stalk 
very short before placing in the vase ; then, 
at night, the lily will close and the stalk curl 
upward ; refresh them by changing the 
water, and in the morning the stalk will be 
straight and the flower open. 

From this time forth Summer has it all her 
own way. After the first of July the yellow 
flowers begin, matching the yellow fire-flies : 
Hawkweeds, Loosestrifes, Primroses bloom, 
and the bushy Wild Indigo. The variety 
of hues increases ; delicate purple Orchises 
bloom in their chosen haunts, and Wild 
Roses blush over hill and dale. On peat- 
meadows the Adder's-Tongue Arethusa (now 
called Pogonia) flowers profusely, with a 
faint, delicious perfume, — and its more 
elegant cousin, the Calopogon, by its side. 
In this vicinity we miss the blue Harebell, the 
identical harebell of Ellen Douglas, which I 
remember as waving its exquisite flowers 
along the banks of the Merrimack, and again 
at Brattleborough, below the cascade in the 
village, where it has climbed the precipitous 
sides of old buildings, and nods inaccessibly 
from their crevices, in that picturesque spot, 
looking down .on the hurrying river. But, 

21 



The Procession of the Flowers 

with this exception, there is nothing wanting 
here of the familiar flowers of early summer. 

The more closely one studies Nature, the 
finer her adaptations grow. For instance, the 
change of seasons is analogous to a change 
of zones, and summer assimilates our vegeta- 
tion to that of the tropics. In those lands, 
Humboldt has remarked, one misses the 
beauty of wild-flowers in the grass, because 
the luxuriance of vegetation develops every- 
thing into shrubs. The form and color are 
beautiful, " but, being too high above the 
soil, they disturb that harmonious proportion 
which characterizes the plants of our Euro- 
pean meadows. Nature has, in every zone, 
stamped on the landscape the peculiar type 
of beauty proper to the locality." But every 
midsummer reveals the same tendency. In 
early spring, when all is bare, and small 
objects are easily made prominent, the wild- 
flowers are generally delicate. Later, when all 
verdure is profusely expanded, these minia- 
ture strokes would be lost, and Nature then 
practises landscape gardening in large, lights 
up the copses wdth great masses of White 
Alder, makes the roadsides gay with Aster 
and Golden-Rod, and tops the tall, coarse 
Meadow-Grass with nodding Lilies and tufted 

22 



The Procession of the Flowers 

Spiraea. One instinctively follows these plain 
hints, and gathers bouquets sparingly in 
spring and exuberantly in summer. 

The use of wild-flowers for decorative pur- 
poses merits a word in passing, for it is un- 
questionably in favored hands a branch of high 
art. It is true that we are bidden, on good 
authority, to love the wood-rose and leave it 
on its stalk ; but against this may be set the 
saying of Bettme Brentano, that " all flowers 
which are broken become immortal in the 
sacrifice ; " and certainly the secret harmonies 
of these fair creatures are so marked and deli- 
cate that we do not understand them till we 
try to group floral decorations for ourselves. 
The most successful artists will not, for in- 
stance, consent to put those together which 
do not grow together ; for Nature understands 
her business, and distributes her masses and 
backgrounds unerringly. Yonder soft and 
feathery Meadow-Sweet longs to be com- 
bined with Wild Roses : it yearns towards 
them in the field, and, after withering in the 
hand most readily, it revives in water as if to 
be with them in the vase. In the same way 
the White Spiraea serves as natural background 
for the Field Lilies. These lilies, by the way, 
are the brightest adornment of our meadows 
23 



The Procession of the Flowers 

during the short period of their perfection. 
We have two species, — one slender, erect, 
solitary, scarlet, looking up to heaven with 
all its blushes on ; the other clustered, droop- 
ing, pale-yellow. I never saw the former in 
such profusion as on the bare summit of 
Wachusett. The granite ribs have there a 
thin covering of crisp moss, spangled with 
the white, starry blossoms of the Mountain 
Cinquefoil ; and as I lay and watched the red 
lilies that waved their innumerable urns 
around me, it needed but little imagination 
to see a thousand altars, sending visible flames 
forever upward to the answering sun. 

August comes: the Thistles are in bloom, 
beloved of butterflies ; deeper and deeper 
tints, more passionate intensities of color, 
prepare the way for the year's decline. A 
wealth of gorgeous Golden-Rod waves over 
all the hills, and enriches every bouquet one 
gathers ; its bright colors conimand the eye, 
and it is graceful as an elm. Fitly arranged, 
it gives a bright relief to the superb beauty 
of the Cardinal-Flowers, the brilliant blue- 
purple of the Vervain, 'the pearl-white of the 
Life-Everlasting, the delicate lilac of the Mon- 
key-Flower, the soft pink and white of the 
Spiraeas, — for the white yet lingers, — all sur- 
24 



The Procession of the Flowers 

rounded by trailing wreaths of blossoming 
Clematis. 

But the Cardinal-Flower is best seen by 
itself, and, indeed, needs the surroundings of 
its native haunts to display its fullest beauty. 
Its favorite abode is along the dank, mossy 
stones of some black and winding brook, 
shaded with overarching bushes, and running 
one long stream of scarlet with these superb 
occupants. It seems amazing how anything 
so brilliant can mature in such a darkness. 
When a ray of sunlight strays in upon it, the 
bright creature seems to hover on the stalk 
ready to take flight, like some lost tropic 
bird. There is a spot whence I have in ten 
minutes brought away as many as I could 
hold in both arms, some bearing fifty blos- 
soms on a single stalk ; and I could not be- 
lieve that there was such another mass of color 
in the world. Nothing cultivated is compar- 
able to them ; and, with all the talent lately 
lavished on wild-flower painting, I have never 
seen the peculiar sheen of these petals in the 
least degree delineated. It seems some new 
and separate tint, equally distinct from scarlet 
and from crimson, a splendor for which there 
is as yet no name, but only the reality. 

It is the signal of autumn, when September 
25 



The Procession of the Flowers 

exhibits the first Barrel-Gentian by the road- 
side; and there is a pretty insect in the 
meadows — the Mourning-Cloak Moth it 
might be called — which gives coincident 
warning. The innumerable Asters mark this 
period with their varied and wide-spread 
beauty ; the meadows are full of rose-colored 
Polygala, of the white spiral spikes of the 
Ladies'-Tresses, and of the fringed loveliness 
of the Gentian. This flower, always unique 
and beautiful, opening its delicate eyelashes 
every morning to the sunlight, closing them 
again each night, has also a thoughtful charm 
about it as the last of the year's especial dar- 
lings. It lingers long, each remaining blos- 
som growing larger and more deep in color, 
as with many other flowers ; and after it there 
is nothing for which to look forward, save the 
fantastic Witch-Hazel. 

On the water, meanwhile, the last White 
Lilies are sinking beneath the surface, and 
the last gay Pickerel-Weed is gone, though 
the rootless plants of the delicate Bladder- 
Wort, spreading over acres of shallows, still 
impurple the wide, smooth surface. Harriet 
Prescott Spofl*ord says that some souls are 
like the Watcr-Lilies, fixed, yet floating. 
But others are like this graceful purple blos- 
26 



The Procession of the Flowers 

som, floating unfixed, kept in place only by 
its fellows around it, until perhaps a breeze 
comes, and, breaking the accidental cohesion, 
sweeps them all away. 

The season reluctantly yields its reign, and 
over the quiet autumnal landscape every- 
where, even after the glory of the trees is 
past, there are tints and fascinations of minor 
beauty. Last October, for instance, in walk- 
ing, I found myself on a little knoll, looking 
northward. Overhead was a bower of chmb- 
ing Waxwork, with its yellowish pods scarce 
disclosing their scarlet berries, — a wild Grape- 
vine, with its fruit withered by the frost into 
still purple raisins, — and yellow Beech-leaves, 
detaching themselves with an effort audible 
to the ear. In the foreground were blue 
Raspberry-stems, yet bearing greenish leaves, 

— pale-yellow Witch-Hazel, almost leafless, 

— purple Viburnum-berries, — the silky co- 
coons of the Milkweed, — and, amid the 
underbrush, a few lingering Asters and 
Golden-Rods, Ferns still green, and Maiden- 
hair, bleached white. In the background 
were hazy hills, white Birches bare and snow- 
like, and a Maple half-way up a sheltered 
hillside, one mass of canary-color, its fallen 
leaves making an apparent reflection on the 

27 



The Procession of the Flowers 

earth at its foot, — and then a real reflection, 
fused into a glassy light intenser than itself, 
upon the smooth, dark stream below. The 
beautiful disrobing suggested the persistent 
and unconquerable delicacy of Nature, who 
shrinks from nakedness and is always seeking 
to veil her graceful boughs, — if not with 
leaves, then with feathery hoar-frost, ermined 
snow, or transparent icy armor. 

After all, the fascination of summer lies not 
in any details, however perfect, but in the 
sense of total wealth that summer gives. 
Wholly to enjoy this, one must give one's 
self passively to it, and not expect to repro- 
duce it in words. We stri\e to picture hea- 
ven, when we are barely at the threshold of 
the inconceivable beauty of earth. Perhaps 
the truant boy who simply bathes himself in 
the lake and then basks in the sunshine, 
dimly conscious of the exquisite loveliness 
around him, is wiser, because humbler, than 
is he who with presumptuous phrases tries 
to utter it. There are moments when the 
atmosphere is so surcharged with luxury 
that every pore of the body becomes an 
ample gate for sensation to flow in, and one 
has simply to sit still and be filled. In after 
years the memory of books seems barren or 
28 



The Procession of the Flowers 

vanishing, compared with the immortal be- 
quest of hours like these. Other sources of 
illumination seem cisterns only; these are 
fountains. They may not increase the mere 
quantity of available thought, but they im- 
part to it a quality which is priceless. No 
man can measure what a single hour with 
Nature may have contributed to the mould- 
ing of his mind. The influence is self-renew- 
ing, and if for a long time It baffles expression 
by reason of its fineness, so much the better 
in the end. 

The soul is like a musical instrument : it is 
not enough that it be framed for the most 
delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long 
and often before the fibres grow mellow to 
the finest waves of sympathy. I perceive 
that in the veery's carolling, the clover's 
scent, the glistening of the water, the waving 
wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the float- 
ing clouds, there are attainable infinitely more 
subtile modulations of thought than I can yet 
reach the sensibility to discriminate, much 
less describe. If in the simple process of 
writing one could physically impart to this 
page the fragrance of this spray of Azalea 
beside me, what a wonder would it seem ! — 
and yet one ought to be able, by the mere 
29 



The Procession of the Flowers 

use of language, to supply to every reader 
the total of that white, honeyed, trailing 
sweetness, which summer insects haunt and 
the Spirit of the Universe loves. The defect 
is not in language, but in men. There is no 
conceivable beauty of blossom so beautiful 
as words, — none so graceful, none so per- 
fumed. It is possible to dream of combina- 
tions of syllables so delicious that all the 
dawning and decay of summer cannot rival 
their perfection, nor winter's stainless white 
and azure match their purity and their 
charm. To wTite them, were it possible, 
would be to take rank with Nature; nor is 
there any other method, even by music, for 
human art to reach so high. 



3c 



II 

APRIL DAYS 



II 

APRIL DAYS 

Can trouble dwell with April days ? 

/;/ Memoriam. 

IN our methodical American life, we still 
recognize some magic in summer. Most 
persons at least resign themselves to being 
decently happy in June. They accept June. 
They compliment its weather. They com- 
plain of the earlier months as cold, and so 
spend them in the city ; and they complain 
of the later months as hot, and so refrigerate 
themselves on some barren sea-coast. God 
offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls ; 
most men choose the fairest, label it June, 
and cast the rest away. It is time to chant a 
hymn of more liberal gratitude. 

There are no days in the whole round year 
more delicious than those which often come 
to us in the latter half of April. On these 
days one goes forth in the morning, and finds 
an Italian warmth brooding over all the hills, 
3 ZZ 



April Days 

taking visible shape in a glistening mist of 
silvered azure, with which mingles the smoke 
from many bonfires. The sun trembles in 
his own soft rays, till one understands the old 
Enghsh tradition, that he dances on Easter- 
Day. Swimming in a sea of glory, the tops 
of the hills look nearer than their bases, 
and their glistening watercourses seem close 
to the eye, as is their liberated murmur to 
the ear. All across this broad intervale 
the teams are ploughing. The grass in the 
meadow seems all to have grown green since 
yesterday. The blackbirds jangle in the oak, 
the robin is perched upon the elm, the song- 
sparrow on the hazel, and the bluebird on 
the apple-tree. There, rises a hawk and sails 
slowly, the stateliest of airy things, a floating 
dream of long and languid summer-hours. 
But as yet, though there is warmth enough 
for a sense of luxury, there is coolness 
enough for exertion. No tropics can offer 
such a burst of joy ; indeed, no zone much 
warmer than our Northern States can offer a 
genuine spring. There can be none where 
there is no winter, and the monotone of the 
seasons is broken only by wearisome rains. 
Vegetation and birds being distributed over 
the year, there is no burst of verdure nor of 
34 



April Days 

song. But with us, as the buds are swelling, 
the birds are arriving; they are building 
their nests almost simultaneously ; and in all 
the Southern year there is no such rapture of 
beauty and of melody as here marks every 
morning from the last of April onward. 

But days even earlier than these, in April, 
have a charm, — even days that seem raw 
and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest 
of March-wind lingers, chasing the squirrel 
from the tree and the children from the 
meadows. There is a fascination in walking 
through these bare early woods, — there is 
such a pause of preparation, winter's work is 
so cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything 
is taken down and put away ; throughout the 
leafy arcades the branches show no remnant 
of last year, save a few twisted leaves of oak 
and beech, a few empty seed-vessels of the 
tardy witch-hazel, and a few gnawed nutshells 
dropped coquettishly by the squirrels into 
the crevices of the bark. All else is bare, 
but prophetic : buds everywhere, the whole 
splendor of the coming summer concentrated 
in those hard little knobs on every bough ; 
and clinging here and there among them a 
brown, papery chrysalis, from which shall 
yet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth. 
35 



April Days 

An occasional shower patters on the dry 
leaves, but it does not silence the robin on 
the outskirts of the wood : indeed, he sings 
louder than ever during rain, though the 
song-sparrow and the bluebird are silent. 

Then comes the sweetness of the nights in 
latter April. There is as yet no evening-prim- 
rose to open suddenly, no cistus to drop its 
petals ; but the May-flower knows the mo- 
ment, and becomes more fragrant in the dark- 
ness, so that one can then often find it in the 
woods without aid from the eye. The pleas- 
ant night-sounds are begun ; the hylas are 
uttering their shrill peep from the meadows, 
mingled soon with hoarser toads, who take 
to the water at this season to deposit their 
spawn. The tree-toads soon join them ; but 
one listens in vain for bull-frogs, or katy- 
dids, or grasshoppers, or whippoorwills, or 
crickets : we must wait for most of these 
until the nights of June. 

The earliest familiar token of the corning 
season is the expansion of the stiff catkins of 
the alder into soft, drooping tresses. These 
are so sensitive, that, if you pluck them at 
almost any time during the winter, a few 
days' sunshine will make them open in a 
vase of water, and thus they eagerly yield to 
36 



April Days 

every moment of April warmth. The blos- 
som of the birch is more delicate, that of the 
willow more showy, but the alders come first. 
They cluster and dance everywhere upon the 
bare boughs above the watercourses; the 
blackness of the buds is softened into rich 
brown and yellow ; and as this graceful crea- 
ture thus comes waving into the spring, it is 
pleasant to remember that the Norse Eddas 
fabled the first woman to have been named 
Embla, because she was created from an 
alder-bough. 

The first wild-flower of the year is like 
land after sea. The two which, throughout 
the Northern Atlantic States, divide this 
interest are the EpigcBa repcns (May-flower, 
ground-laurel, or trailing-arbutus) and the 
Hepatica triloba (liverleaf, liverwort, or blue 
anemone). Of these two, the latter is per- 
haps more immediately exciting on first 
discovery, because it is an annual, not a per- 
ennial, and so does not, like the epigaea, 
exhibit its buds all winter, but opens its blue 
eyes almost as soon as it emerges from the 
ground. Without the rich and delicious 
odor of its compeer, it has an inexpressibly 
fresh and earthy scent, that seems to bring 
all the promise of the blessed season with it; 
37 



April Days 

indeed, that clod of fresh turf with the inhala- 
tion of which Lord Bacon delighted to begin 
the day must undoubtedly have been full of 
the roots of our little hepatica. Its healthy 
sweetness belongs to the opening year, like 
Chaucer's poetry ; and one thinks that any- 
thing more potent and voluptuous would be 
less enchanting — until one turns to the May- 
flower. Then comes a richer fascination for 
the senses. To pick the May-flower is like 
following in the footsteps of some spendthrift 
army which has scattered the contents of its 
treasure-chest among beds of scented moss. 
The fingers sink in the soft, moist verdure, 
and make at each instant some superb dis- 
covery unawares ; again and again, straying 
carelessly, they clutch some new treasure; 
and, indeed, the plants are linked together in 
bright necklaces by secret 'threads beneath 
the surface, and where you grasp at one, you 
hold many. The hands go wandering over 
the moss as over the keys of a piano, and 
bring forth odors for melodies. The lovely 
creatures twine and nestle and lay their glow- 
ing faces to the very earth beneath withered 
leaves, and what seemed mere barrenness 
becomes fresh and fragrant beauty. So great 
is the charm of the pursuit, that the epigaea 
38 



April Days 

is really the wild-flower for which our country- 
people have a hearty passion. Every village 
child knows its best haunts, and watches for 
it eagerly in the spring; boys wreathe their 
hats with it, girls twine it in their hair, and 
the cottage windows are filled with its 
beauty. 

In collecting these early flowers, one finds 
or fancies singular natural affinities. I flatter 
myself with being able always to discover 
hepatica, if there is any within reach, for I 
was brought up with it; but other persons, 
who were brought up with May-flower, and 
remember searching for it with their childish 
fingers, can find that better. The most re- 
markable instance of these natural affinities 
was in the case of Levi Thaxter and his 
double anemones. Thaxter had always a gift 
for wild-flowers, and used often to bring to 
Cambridge the largest white anemones that 
were ever seen, from a certain special hill in 
Watertown ; they were not only magnificent 
in size and whiteness, but had that exquisite 
blue on the outside of the petals, as if the sky 
had bent down in ecstasy at last over its 
darlings, and left visible kisses there. But 
even this success was not enough, and one 
day he came with something yet choicer. It 
39 



April Days 

was a rue-leaved anemone (A. thalictroides) ; 
and each one of the three white flowers was 
double, not merely with that multiplicity of 
petals in the disk which is common with this 
species, but technically and horticulturally 
double, like the double-flowering almond or 
cherry, — with the most exquisitely delicate 
little petals, like fairy lace-work. He had 
three specimens, and gave one to Professor 
Asa Gray, of Harvard, who said it was almost 
or quite unexampled, and another to me. As 
the man in the fable says of the chameleon, 
" I have it yet and can produce it." 

Now comes the marvel. The next winter 
Thaxter went to New York for a year, and 
wrote to me, as spring drew near, with solemn 
charge to visit his favorite haunt and find 
another specimen. Armed with this letter of 
introduction, I sought the spot, and tramped 
through and through its leafy corridors. 
Beautiful wood-anemones I found, to be 
sure, trembling on their fragile, stems, deserv- 
ing all their pretty names, — Wind-flower, 
Easter-flower, Pasque-Flower, and homoeo- 
pathic Pulsatilla ; — rue-leaved anemones I 
found also, rising taller and straighter and 
firmer in stem, with the whorl of leaves a 
little higher up on the stalk than one fancies 
40 



April Days 

it ought to be, as if there were a supposed 
danger that the flowers would lose their 
balance, and as if the leaves must be all ready 
to catch them. These I found, but the 
special wonder was not there for me. Then 
I wrote to him that he must evidently come 
himself and search ; or that, perhaps, as 
Sir Thomas Browne avers that " smoke doth 
follow the fairest," so his little treasures had 
followed him towards New York. Judge of 
my surprise, when, on opening his next letter, 
out dropped, from those folds of metropolitan 
paper, a veritable double anemone. He had 
just been out to Hoboken, or some such 
place, to spend an afternoon, and, of course, 
his pets were there to meet him; and from 
that day to this I have never heard of such 
an event as happening to any one else. 

May-Day is never allowed to pass in this 
community without profuse lamentations over 
the tardiness of our spring as compared with 
that of England and the poets. Yet it is easy 
to exaggerate this difference. Even so good 
an observer as Wilson Flagg is betrayed into 
saying that the epigaea and hepatica '' seldom 
make their appearance until after the middle 
of April " in Massachusetts, and that " it is 
not unusual for the whole month of April to 
41 



April Days 

pass away without producing more than two 
or three species of wild-flowers." But I have 
formerly found the hepatica in bloom at 
Mount Auburn, for three successive years, on 
the twenty-seventh of March; and it has 
since been found in Worcester on the seven- 
teenth, and in Danvers on the twelfth. The 
May-flower is usually as early, though the 
more gradual expansion of the buds renders 
it less easy to give dates. And there are 
nearly twenty species which I have noted, for 
five or six years together, as found always 
before May-Day, and therefore properly to be 
assigned to April. The list includes blood- 
root, cowslip, houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, 
chickweed, cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, 
bellwort, dog's-tooth violet, five species of 
violet proper, and two of anemone. These 
are all common flowers, and easily observed ; 
but the catalogue might be increased by rare 
ones, as the white corydalis, the smaller 
yellow violet ( F. rotundifolia) , and the clay- 
tonia or spring-beauty. 

But in England the crocus and the snow- 
drop — neither being probably an indigenous 
flower, since neither is mentioned by Chaucer 
■ — usually open before the first of March; 
indeed, the snowdrop was formerly known by 
42 



April Days 

the yet more fanciful name of " Fair Maid of 
February." Chaucer's daisy comes equally 
early; and March brings daffodils, narcissi, 
violets, daisies, jonquils, hyacinths, and marsh- 
marigolds. This is altogether in advance of 
our season, so far as the wild-flowers give evi- 
dence, — though snowdrops are sometimes 
found in February even here. But, on the 
other hand, it would appear that, though a 
larger number of birds winter in England 
than in Massachusetts, yet the return of those 
which migrate is actually earlier among us. 
From journals which were kept during sixty 
years in England, and an abstract of which 
is printed in Hone's '' Every-Day Book," it 
appears that only two birds of passage revisit 
England before the fifteenth of April, and 
only thirteen more before the first of May ; 
while with us the song-sparrow, the bluebird, 
and the red-winged blackbird appear about 
the first of March, and a good many more by 
the middle of April. This is a pecuHarity of 
the English spring which I have never seen 
explained or even mentioned. 

After the epigaea and the hepatica have 

blossomed, there is a slight pause among the 

wild-flowers, — these two forming a distinct 

prologue for their annual drama, as the bril- 

43 



April Days 

liant witch-"hazel in October brings up its 
separate epilogue. The truth is, Nature atti- 
tudinizes a little, liking to make a neat finish 
with everything, and then to begin again with 
eclat. Flowers seem spontaneous things 
enough, but there is evidently a secret mar- 
shalling among them, that all may be brought 
out with due effect. As the country-people 
say that so long as any snow is left on the 
ground more snow may be expected, for it 
must all vanish together at last, — so every 
seeker of spring-flowers has observed how 
accurately they seem to move in platoonS;. 
with little straggling. Each species seems to 
burst upon us with a united impulse; you 
may search for it day after day in vain, but 
the day when you find one specimen the spell 
is broken and you find twenty. By the end 
of April all the margins of the great poem of 
the woods are illuminated with these exquisite 
vignettes. 

Most of the early flowers either come be- 
fore the full unfolding of their leaves, or else 
have inconspicuous ones. Yet Nature always 
provides for her garlands the due proportion 
of green. The verdant and graceful sprays 
of the wild raspberry are unfolded very early, 
long before its time of flowering. Over the 
44 



April Days 

meadows spread the regular Chinese-pagodas 
of the equisetum (horsetail or scouring-rush), 
and the rich, coarse vegetation of the vera- 
trum, or American hellebore. In moist 
copses the ferns and osmundas begin to un- 
curl in April, opening their soft coils of 
spongy verdure, coated with woolly down, 
from which the humming-bird steals the lin- 
ing of her nest. 

The early blossoms represent the aborigi- 
nal epoch of our history : the bloodroot and 
the May-flower are older than the white man, 
older perchance than the red man; they 
alone are the true Native Americans. Of the 
later wild plants, many of the most common 
are foreign importations. In our sycophancy 
we attach grandeur to the name " exotic ; " 
we call aristocratic garden-flowers by that 
epithet ; yet they are no more exotic than the 
humbler companions they brought with them, 
which have become naturalized. The dande- 
lion, the buttercup, chickweed, celandine, 
mullein, burdock, yarrow, whiteweed, night- 
shade, and most of the thistles, — these are 
importations. Miles Standish never crushed 
them with his heavy heel as he strode forth 
to give battle to the savages ; they never 
kissed the daintier foot of Priscilla, the Puri- 
45 



April Days 

tan maiden. It is noticeable that these are 
all of rather coarser texture than our indige- 
nous flowers; the children instinctively recog- 
nize this, and are apt to omit them when 
gathering the more delicate native blossoms 
of the woods. 

There is something touching in the gradual 
retirement before civilization of these fragile 
aborigines. They do not wait for the actual 
brute contact of red bricks and curbstones, 
but they feel the danger miles away. The 
Indians called the low plantain " the white 
man's footstep;" and these shy creatures 
gradually disappear the moment the red man 
gets beyond hearing. Bigelow's delightful 
book " Florula Bostoniensis" is becoming a 
series of epitaphs. Too well we know it, — 
those of us who in happy Cambridge child- 
hood often gathered, almost within a stone's- 
throw of Professor Agassiz's new museum, the 
arethusa and the gentian, the cardinal-flower 
and the gaudy rhexia, — we who remember 
the last secret hiding-place of the rhodora in 
West Cambridge, of the yellow violet and the 
Viola debilis in Watertown, of the Convallaria 
trifolia near Fresh Pond, of the Hottonia be- 
yond Wellington's Hill, of the Corniis florida 
in West Roxbury, of the Clintonia and the 
46 



April Days 

dwarf ginseng in Brookline, — we who have 
found in its one chosen nook the sacred An- 
dromeda polifolia of Linnaeus. Now vanished 
almost or wholly from city suburbs, these 
fragile creatures still linger in more rural parts 
of Massachusetts ; butthey are doomed every- 
where, unconsciously, yet irresistibly; while 
others still more shy, as the Linn(2a, the 
yellow Cypripedium, the early pink Azalea, 
and the delicate white Corydalis or '* Dutch- 
man's breeches," are being chased into the 
very recesses of the Green and White Moun- 
tains. The reHcs of the Indian tribes are 
supported by the Legislature at Martha's 
Vineyard, while these precursors of the Indian 
are dying unfriended away. 

And with these receding plants go also the 
special insects which haunt them. Who that 
knew the pure enthusiast, Dr. Thaddeus Wil- 
liam Harris, but remembers the accustomed 
lamentations of the entomologist over the de- 
parture of these winged companions of his life- 
time ? In a letter which I happened to receive 
from him a short time previous to his death, 
he thus renewed the lament : '' I mourn for 
the loss of many of the beautiful plants and 
insects that were once found in this vicinity. 
Clethray Rhodora, Sanguinaria, Viola dcbiliSy 
47 



April Days 

Viola acuta, Draccena horealis, Rhexiay Cypri- 
pediiini, CorallorJiiza vcrna, Orchis spcctabilis, 
with others of less note, have been rooted 
out by the so-called hand of improvement. 
Cicindcla rugifrojis, Hclluo prceusta, Sphcero- 
derus stenostonnis, Blctliisa qiiadricollis {^Amer- 
icana mi), Carabus, Horia (which for several 
years occurred in profusion on the sands 
beyond Mount Auburn), with others, have 
entirely disappeared from their former 
haunts, driven away, or exterminated per- 
haps, by the changes effected therein. There 
may still remain in your vicinity some se- 
questered spots, congenial to these and other 
rarities, which may reward the botanist and 
the entomologist who will search them care- 
fully. Perhaps you may find there the pretty 
coccinella-shaped, silver-margined OmopJiron, 
or the still rarer Panagoeits fasciatus, of which 
I once took two specimens on Wellington's 
Hill, but have not seen it since." Is not this, 
indeed, handling one's specimens " gently as 
if you loved them," as Isaak Walton bids the 
angler do with his worm? 

There is this merit, at least, among the 

coarser crew of imported flowers, that they 

bring their own proper names with them, and 

we know precisely with whom we have to 

48 



April Days 

deal. In speaking of our own native flowers 
we must either be careless and inaccurate, or 
else resort sometimes to the Latin, in spite of 
the indignation of friends. There is some- . 
thing yet to be said on this point. In Eng- 
land, where the old household and monkish 
names adhere, they are sufficient for popular 
and poetic purposes, and the familiar use of 
scientific names seems an affectation. But 
here, where many native flowers have no 
popular names at all, and others are called 
confessedly by wrong ones, — where it really 
costs less trouble to use Latin names than 
English, — the affectation seems the other 
way. Think of the long list of wild-flowers 
where the Latin name is spontaneously used 
by all who speak of the flower : as, Arethusa, 
Aster, Cistus C' after the fall of the cistus- 
flower"). Clematis, Clethra, Geranium, Iris, 
Lobelia, Rhodora, Spiraea, Tiarella, Trien- 
talis, and so on. Even those formed from 
proper names — the worst possible system of 
nomenclature — become tolerable at last, and 
we forget the godfather in the more attractive 
namesake. When the person concerned hap- 
pens to be a botanist, there is a peculiar fit- 
ness in the association ; the Linnaea, at least, 
would not smell so sweet by any other name. 
4 49 



April Days 

In other cases the English name is a mere 
modification of the Latin one, and our ideal 
associations have really a scientific basis : as 
with Violet, Lily, Laurel, Gentian, Vervain. 
Indeed, our enthusiasm for vernacular names 
is, like that for Indian names of localities, one- 
sided : we enumerate only the graceful ones, 
and ignore the rest. It would be a pity to 
Latinize Touch-me-not, or Yarrow, or Gold 
Thread, or Self-Heal, or Columbine, or Blue- 
Eyed Grass, — though, to be sure, this last 
has an annoying way of shutting up its azure 
orbs the moment you gather it, and you 
reach home with a bare, stiff blade, which 
deserves no better name than SisyriiicJiium 
anccps. But in what respect is Cucumber- 
Root preferable to Medeola, or Solomon's- 
Seal to Convallaria, or Rock-Tripe to Umbi- 
licaria, or Lousewort to Pedicularis? In 
other cases the merit is divided : Anemone 
may dispute the prize of melody with Wind- 
flower, Campanula with Harebell, Neottia 
with Ladies'-Tresses, Uvularia with Bellwort 
and Strawbell, Potentilla with Cinquefoil, and 
Sanguinaria with Bloodroot. Hepatica may 
be bad, but Liverleaf is worse. The pretty 
name of May-flower is not so popular, after 
all, as that of Trailing-Arbutus, where the 
50 



April Days 

graceful and appropriate adjective redeems 
the substantive, which happens to be Latin 
and incorrect at once. It does seem a waste 
of time to say CJirysantJieimini IcucantJicmiun 
instead of Whiteweed ; though, if the long 
scientific name were an incantation to banish 
the intruder, our farmers would gladly con- 
sent to adopt it. 

But a great advantage of a reasonable use 
of the botanical name is, that it does not 
deceive us. Our primrose is not the English 
primrose, any more than it was our robin 
who tucked up the babes in the wood ; our 
cowslip is not the English cowslip, it is 
the English marsh-marigold, — Tennyson's 
marsh-marigold. The pretty name of Azalea 
means something definite ; but its rural name 
of Honeysuckle confounds under that name 
flowers without even an external resemblance, 
— Azalea, Diervilla, Lonicera, Aquilegia, — 
just as every bird which sings loud in deep 
woods is popularly denominated a thrush. 
The really rustic names of both plants and 
animals are very few with us, — the different 
species are many ; and as we come to know 
them better and love them more, we abso- 
lutely require some way to distinguish them 
from their half-sisters and second-cousins. 
51 



April Days 

It is hopeless to try to create new popular 
epithets, or even to revive those which are 
thoroughly obsolete. Miss Cooper may 
strive in vain, with benevolent intent, to 
christen her favorite spring blossoms ** May- 
Wings " and '* Gay-Wings," and *' Fringe- 
Cup " and *' Squirrel-Cup," and '' Cool-Wort" 
and "Bead-Ruby;" there is no conceivable 
reason why these should not be the familiar 
appellations, except the irresistible fact that 
they are not. It is impossible to create a 
popular name : one might as well attempt to 
invent a legend or compose a ballad. Nas- 
cittir, no7i fit. 

As the spring comes on, and the changing 
outlines of the elm give daily a new design 
for a Grecian urn, — its hue first brown 
with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — 
we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the 
bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone 
the trees denude themselves each year, like 
the goddesses before Paris, that we may see 
which unadorned loveliness is the fairest. 
Only the unconquerable delicacy of the beech 
still keeps its soft vestments about it : far into 
spring, when worn to thin rags and tatters, 
they cling there still ; and when they fall, the 
new appear as by magic. It must be owned, 
52 



April Days 

however, that the beech has good reasons for 
this prudishness, and has hereabouts Httle 
beauty of figure ; while the elms, maples, 
chestnuts, walnuts, and even oaks, have not 
exhausted all their store of charms for us, 
until we have seen them disrobed. Only 
yonder magnificent pine-tree, — that pitch- 
pine, nobler when seen in perfection than 
white-pine, or Norwegian, or Norfolk-Islander, 
— that pitch-pine, herself a grove, una nemiiSy 
holds her unchanging beauty throughout the 
year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose 
voice she shares ; and only marks the flowing 
of her annual tide of life by the new verdure 
that yearly submerges all trace of last year's 
ebb. 

How many lessons of faith and beauty we 
should lose if there were no winter in our 
year ! Sometimes In following up a water- 
course an\ong our hills, in the early spring, 
one comes to a weird and desolate place, 
where one huge wild grape-vine has wreathed 
its ragged arms around a whole thicket and 
brought it to the ground, — swarming to the 
tops of hemlocks, clenching a dozen young 
maples at once and tugging them downward, 
stretching its wizard black length across the 
underbrush, into the earth and out again, 



April Days 

wrenching up great stones in its blind, aim- 
less struggle. What a piece of chaos is this ! 
»Yet come here again, two months hence, and 
you shall find all this desolation clothed with 
beauty and with fragrance, one vast bower of 
soft green leaves and graceful tendrils, while 
summer birds chirp and flutter amid these 
sunny arches all the livelong day. 

To the end of April, and often later, one 
still finds remains of snow-banks in sheltered 
woods, especially among evergreens ; and this 
snow, like that upon high mountains, has 
often become hardened, by the repeated thaw- 
ing and freezing of the surface, till it is more 
impenetrable than ice. But the snow that 
falls during April is usually what Vermonters 
call " sugar-snow," — falling in the night and 
just whitening the surface for an hour or two, 
and taking its name, not so much from its 
looks as from the fact that it denotes the 
proper weather for " sugaring," namely, cold 
nights and warm days. Our saccharine asso- 
ciations, however, remain so obstinately tropi- 
cal, that it seems almost impossible for the 
imagination to locate sugar in New-England 
trees ; though it is known that not the maple 
only, but the birch and the walnut even, 
afford it in appreciable quantities. 
54 



April Days 

Along our maritime rivers the people asso- 
ciate April, not with ** sugaring," but with 
'' shadding." The pretty Amelanchier Cana- 
densis of Gray — the Ajvnia of Whittier's 
song— is called Shad-bush, or Shad-blow, in 
Essex County, from its connection with this 
season ; and there is a bird known as the 
Shad-spirit, which I take to be identical with 
the flicker or golden-winged woodpecker, 
whose note is still held to indicate the first 
day when the fish ascend the river. Upon 
such slender wings flits our New-England 
romance ! 

In April the creative process described by 
Thales is repeated, and the world is renewed 
by water. The submerged creatures first feel 
the touch of spring, and many an equivocal 
career, beginning in the ponds and brooks, 
learns later to ignore this obscure beginning, 
and hops or flutters in the dusty daylight. 
Early in March, before the first male canker- 
moth appears on the elm-tree, the whirlwig 
beetles have begun to play round the broken 
edges of the ice, and the caddis-worms to 
crawl beneath it ; and soon come the water- 
skater {Gerris) and the water-boatman {Noto- 
nectd). Turtles and newts are in busy motion 
when the spring-birds are only just arriving. 
55 



April Days 

Those gelatinous masses in yonder wayside 
pond are the spawn of water-newts or tritons: 
in the clear, transparent jelly are imbedded, 
at regular intervals, little blackish dots ; these 
elongate rapidly, and show symptoms of head 
and tail curled up in a spherical cell ; the 
jelly is gradually absorbed for their nourish- 
ment, until, on some fine morning, each elon- 
gated dot gives one vigorous wriggle, and 
claims thenceforward all the privileges of 
freedom. The final privilege is often that of 
being suddenly snapped up by a turtle or a 
snake : for Nature brings forth her creatures 
liberally, especially the aquatic ones, sacri- 
fices nine-tenths of them as food for their 
larger cousins, and reserves only a handful to 
propagate their race, on the same profuse 
scale, next season. 

It is surprising, in the midst of our Museums 
and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know 
of the common things around us. Our savans 
still confess their inability to discriminate with 
certainty the ^g'g or tadpole of a frog from 
that of a toad ; and it is strange that these 
hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, 
should coincide so nearly in their juvenile 
career, while the tritons and salamanders, 
which border so closely on each other in 

56 



April Days 

their maturer state as sometimes to be hardly- 
distinguishable, yet choose different methods 
and different elements for laying their eggs. 
The eggs of our salamanders, or land-lizards, 
are deposited beneath the moss on some 
damp rock, without any gelatinous envelope ; 
they are but few in number, and the anxious 
mamma may sometimes be found coiled in a 
circle around them, like the symbolic serpent 
of eternity. 

The small number of birds yet present in 
early April gives a better opportunity for 
careful study, — more especially if one goes 
armed with that best of fowling-pieces, a 
small spy-glass : the best, — since how value- 
less for purposes of observation is the bleed- 
ing, gasping, dying body, compared with the 
fresh and living creature, as it tilts, trembles, 
and warbles on the bough before you ! Ob- 
serve that robin in the oak-tree's top : as he 
sits and sings, every one of the dozen differ- 
ent notes which he flings down to you is ac- 
companied by a separate flirt and flutter of 
his whole body, and, as Thoreau says of the 
squirrel, " each movement seems to imply a 
spectator." Study that song-sparrow: why 
is it that he always goes so ragged in spring, 
and the bluebird so neat? Is it that the song- 
57 



April Days 

sparrow is a wild artist, absorbed in the com- 
position of his lay, and oblivious of ordinary 
proprieties, while the sjiiooth bluebird and 
his ash-colored mate cultivate their delicate 
warble only as a domestic accomplishment, 
and are always nicely dressed before sitting 
down at the piano? Then how exciting is 
the gradual arrival of the birds in their sum- 
mer plumage ! To watch it is like sitting at 
the window on Easter Sunday to observe the 
new bonnets. Yonder, in that clump of alders 
by the brook, is the delicious jargoning of the 
first flock of yellow-birds ; there are the little 
gentlemen in black and yellow, and the little 
ladies in olive-brown ; '' sweet, sweet, sweet," 
is the only word they say, and often they will 
so lower their ceaseless warble that, though 
almost within reach, the minstrels seem far 
distant. There is the very earliest cat-bird, 
mimicking the bobolink before the bobolink 
has come : what is the history of his song, 
then? Is it a reminiscence of last year, or 
has the little coquette been practising it all 
winter, in some gay Southern society, where 
cat-birds and bobolinks grow intimate, just as 
Southern fashionables from different States 
may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There 
sounds the sweet, low, long-continued trill of 
S8 



April Days 

the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a sug- 
gestion of insect sounds in sultry summer: 
by and by we shall sometimes hear that same 
delicate rhythm burst the silence of the June 
midnights, and then, ceasing, make stillness 
more still. Now watch that woodpecker, 
roving in ceaseless search, travelling over 
fifty trees in an hour, running from top to 
bottom of some small sycamore, pecking at 
every crevice, pausing to dot a dozen inex- 
plicable holes in a row upon an apple-tree, 
but never once intermitting the low, queru- 
lous murmur of housekeeping anxiety. Some- 
times she stops to hammer with all her little 
life at some tough piece of bark, strikes 
harder and harder blows, throws herself back 
at last, flapping her wings furiously as she 
brings down her whole strength again upon 
it; finally it yields, and grub after grub goes 
down her throat, till she whets her beak after 
the meal as a wild beast licks its claws, and is 
off on her pressing business once more. 

It is no wonder that there is so little sub- 
stantial enjoyment of Nature in the commun- 
ity, when we feed children on grammars and 
dictionaries only, and take no pains to train 
them to see that which is before their eyes. 
The mass of the community have " summered 
59 



April Days 

and wintered " the universe pretty regularly, 
one would think, for a good many years ; and 
yet nine persons out of ten in the town or 
city, and two out of three even in the country, 
seriously suppose, for instance, that the buds 
upon trees are formed in the spring; they 
have had them within sight all winter, and 
never seen them. So people think, in good 
faith, that a plant grows at the base of the 
stem, instead of at the top : that is, if they 
see a young sapling in which there is a crotch 
at five feet from the ground, they expect to 
see it ten feet from the ground by and by, — 
confounding the growth of a tree with that of 
a man or animal. But perhaps the best of 
us could hardly bear the system of tests un- 
consciously laid down by a small child of my 
acquaintance. The boy's father, a college- 
bred man, had early chosen the better part, 
and employed his fine faculties in rearing 
laurels in his own beautiful nursery-gardens, 
instead of in the more arid soil of court-rooms 
or state-houses. Of course the young human 
scion knew the flowers by name before he 
knew his letters, and used their symbols more 
readily; and after he got the command of 
both, he was one day asked by his younger 
brother what the word "idiot" meant, — for 
60 



April Days 

somebody in the parlor had been saying that 
somebody else was an idiot. " Don't you 
know? " quoth Ben, in his sweet voice: " an 
idiot is a person who does n't know an arbor- 
vitse from a pine, — he doesn't know any- 
thing." When Ben grows up to maturity, 
bearing such terrible definitions in his un- 
shrinking hands, which of us will be safe? 

The softer aspects of Nature, especially, re- 
quire time and culture before man can enjoy 
them. To rude races her processes bring 
only terror, which is very slowly outgrown. 
Humboldt has best exhibited the scantiness 
of finer natural perceptions in Greek and 
Roman literature, in spite of the grand oceanic 
rhythm of Homer, and the delicate water- 
coloring of the Greek Anthology and of 
Horace. The Oriental and the Norse sacred 
books are full of fresh and beautiful allusions ; 
but the Greek saw in Nature only a frame- 
work for Art, and the Roman only a camping- 
ground for men. Even Virgil describes the 
grotto of ^neas merely as a '' black grove " 
with " horrid shade," — '' Horrenti atrum 
nemus imminet ttnibra!' Wordsworth points 
out, that, even in English literature, the 
'^Windsor Forest" of Anne, Countess of 
Winchelsea, was the first poem which repre- 
6i 



April Days 

sented Nature as a thing to be consciously 
enjoyed ; and as she was almost the first 
English poetess, we might be tempted to 
think that we owe this appreciation, like some 
other good things, to the participation of 
woman in literature. But, on the other hand, 
it must be remembered that the voluminous 
Duchess of Newcastle, in her *' Ode on Mel- 
ancholy," describes . among the symbols of 
hopeless gloom ** the still moonshine night " 
and '* a mill where rushing waters run about," 
— the sweetest natural images. In our own 
country, the early explorers seemed to find 
only horror in its woods and waterfalls. 
Josselyn, in 1672, could only describe the 
summer splendor of the White Mountain re- 
gion as " dauntingly terrible, being full of 
rocky hills, as thick as molehills in a meadow, 
and full of infinite thick woods." Father 
Hennepin spoke of Niagara, in the narrative 
still quoted in the guide-books, as a " fright- 
ful cataract; " and honest John Adams could 
find no better name than " horrid chasm " for 
the picturesque gulf at Egg Rock, where he 
first saw the sea-anemone. 

But we are lingering too long, perhaps, 
with this sweet April of smiles and tears. It 
needs only to add, that all her traditions are 
62 



April Days 

beautiful. Ovid says well, that she was not 
named from aperire, to open, as some have 
thought, but from Aphrodite, goddess of 
beauty. April holds Easter-time, St. George's 
Day, and the Eve of St. Mark's. She has 
not, like her sister May in Germany, been 
transformed to a verb and made a synonyme 
for joy, — " Deine Seele maiet den truben 
Herbst,'' — but April was believed in early 
ages to have been the birth-time of the world. 
According to the Venerable Bede, the point 
was first accurately determined at a council 
held at Jerusalem about A. D. 200, when, 
after much profound discussion, it was finally 
decided that the world's birthday occurred on 
Sunday, April 8th, — that is, at the vernal 
equinox and the full moon. But April is cer- 
tainly the birth-time of the season, at least, 
if not of the planet. Its festivals are older 
than Christianity, older than the memory of 
man. No sad associations cling to it, as to 
the month of June, in which month, says 
William of Malmesbury, kings are wont to 
go to war, — '' Qiiando solent reges ad anna 
procedere^' — but it contains the Holy Week, 
and it is the Holy Month. And in April 
Shakespeare was born, and in April he died. 



63 



Ill 

WATER-LILIES 



Ill 

WATER-LILIES 

THE inconstant April mornings drop 
showers or sunbeams over the glisten- 
ing lake, while far beneath its surface a murky 
mass disengages itself from the muddy bottom, 
and rises slowly through the waves. The 
tasselled alder-branches droop above it; the 
last year's blackbird's nest swings over it in 
the grape-vine ; the newly opened Hepaticas 
and Epigaeas on the neighboring bank peer 
down modestly to look for it; the water- 
skater (Gerris) pauses on the surface near it, 
casting on the shallow bottom the odd shadow 
of his feet, like three pairs of boxing-gloves ; 
the Notonecta, or water-boatman, rows round 
and round it, sometimes on his breast, some- 
times on his back ; queer caddis-worms trail 
their self-made homesteads of leaves or twigs 
beside it; the Dytiscus, dor-bug of the water, 
blunders clumsily against it; the tadpole 
wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon 
it, meditating of future frogdom ; the passing 
67 



Water- Lilies 

wild-duck dives and nibbles at it ; the mink 
and muskrat brush it with their soft fur ; the 
spotted turtle slides over it ; the slow larvae 
of gauzy dragon-flies cHng sleepily to its sides 
and await their change : all these fair or un- 
couth creatures feel, through the dim waves, 
the blessed longing of spring ; and yet not 
one of them dreams that within that murky 
mass there lies a treasure too white and 
beautiful to be yet intrusted to the waves, and 
that for many a day the bud must yearn 
toward the surface, before, aspiring above 
it, as mortals to heaven, it meets the sun 
shine with the answering beauty of the VVater- 
Lily. 

Days and weeks have passed away ; the 
wild-duck has flown onward, to dive for his 
luncheon in some remoter lake ; the tadpoles 
have made themselves legs, with which they 
have vanished ; the caddis-worms have sealed 
themselves up in their cylinders, and emerged 
again as winged insects ; the dragon-flies have 
crawled up the water-reeds, and, clinging with 
heads upturned, have undergone the change 
which symbolizes immortality; the world is 
transformed from spring to summer; the lily- 
buds are opened into glossy leaf and radiant 
flower, and we have come for the harvest. 

6d> 



Water-Lilies 

We visitors lodged, last night, in the .old 
English phrase, '* at the sign of the Oak and 
Star." Wishing not, indeed, like the ancient 
magicians, to gather magic berry and bud 
before sunrise, but at least to see these treas- 
ures of the lake in their morning hour, we 
camped overnight on a little island, which 
one tall tree almost covers with its branches, 
while a dense undergrowth of young chest- 
nuts and birches fills all the intervening space,* 
touching the water all around the circular, 
shelving shore. The day had been hot, but 
the night was cool, and we kindled a gypsy 
fire of twigs, less for warmth than for society. 
The first gleam made the dark, lonely islet 
into a cheering home, turned the protecting 
tree to a starlit roof, and the chestnut-sprays 
to illuminated walls. To us, lying beneath 
their shelter, every fresh flickering of the fire 
kindled the leaves into brightness and ban- 
ished into dark interstices the lake and sky; 
then the fire died into embers, the leaves faded 
into solid darkness in their turn, and water 
and heavens showed light and close and near, 
until fresh twigs caught fire and the blaze 
came up again. Rising to look forth at inter- 
vals, during the peaceful hours, — for it is the 
worst feature of a night out-doors, that sleep- 

69 



Water-Lilies 

ing seems such a waste of time, — we watched 
the hilly and wooded shores of the lake sink 
into gloom and glimmer into dawn again, 
amid the low plash of waters and the noises 
of the night. 

Precisely at half-past three, a song-sparrow 
above our heads gave one liquid trill, so in- 
expressibly sudden and delicious, that it 
seemed to set to music every atom of fresh- 
ness and fragrance that Nature held ; then 
the spell was broken, and the whole shore 
and lake were vocal with song. Joining in 
this jubilee of morning, we were early in mo- 
tion ; bathing and breakfast, though they 
seemed indisputably in accordance with the 
instincts of the Universe, yet did not detain 
us long, and we were promptly on our way 
to Lily Pond. Will the reader join us? 

It is one of those summer days when a veil 
of mist gradually burns away before the intense 
sunshine, and the sultry morning only plays 
at coolness, and that with its earliest visitors 
alone. But we are before the sunlight, 
though not before the sunrise, and can watch 
"the pretty game of alternating mist and shine. 
Stray gleams of glory lend their trailing mag- 
nificence to the tops of chestnut-trees, floating 
vapors raise the outlines of the hills and make 
70 



Water- Lilies 

mystery of the wooded islands, and, as we 
glide through the placid water, we can sing, 
with the Chorus in the '' Ion " of Euripides, 
** O immense and brilliant air, resound with 
our cries of joy ! " 

Almost every town has its Lily Pond, dear 
to boys and maidens, and partially equalizing, 
by its annual delights, the presence or absence 
of other geographical advantages. Ours is 
accessible from the larger lake only by taking 
the skiff over a narrow embankment, which 
protects our fairy-land by its presence, and 
eight distant factories by its dam. Once be- 
yond it, we are in a realm of dark Lethean 
water, utterly unlike the sunny depths of the 
main lake. Hither the water-lilies have re- 
treated, to a domain of their own. In the 
bosom of these shallow waves, there stand 
hundreds of submerged and dismasted roots, 
still upright, spreading their vast, uncouth 
limbs like enormous spiders beneath the sur- 
face. They are remnants of border wars with 
the axe, vegetable Witheringtons, still fighting 
on their stumps, but gradually sinking into 
the soft ooze, and ready, perhaps, when a 
score of centuries has piled two more strata 
of similar remains in mud above them, to 
furnish foundations for a newer New Orleans ; 
71 



Water-Lilies 

that city having been lately discovered to be 
thus supported. 

The present decline in the manufacturing 
business is clear revenue to the water-lilies, 
and these ponds are higher than usual, be- 
cause the idle mills do not draw them off. 
But we may notice, in observing the shores, 
that peculiar charm of water, that, whether 
its quantity be greater or less, its grace is the 
same ; it makes its own boundary in lake or 
river, and where its edge is, there seems the 
natural and permanent margin. And the 
same natural fitness, without reference to 
mere quantity, extends to its flowery children. 
Before us lie islands and continents of lilies, 
acres of charms, whole, vast, unbroken sur- 
faces of stainless whiteness. And yet, as we 
approach them, every island cup that floats 
in lonely dignity, apart from the multitude, 
appears perfect in itself, couched in white 
expanded perfection, its reflection taking a 
faint glory of pink that is scarcely perceptible 
in the flower. As we glide gently among 
them, the air grows fragrant, and a stray 
breeze flaps the leaves, as if to welcome us. 
Each floating flower becomes suddenly a ship 
at anchor, or rather seems beating up against 
the summer wind in a regatta of blossoms, 
72 



Water- Lilies 

Early as it is in the day, the greater part 
of the flowers are already expanded. Indeed, 
that experience of Thoreau's, of watching 
them open in the first sunbeams, rank by 
rank, is not easily obtained, unless perhaps 
in a narrow stream, where the beautiful 
slumberers are more regularly marshalled. 
In our lake, at least, they open irregularly, 
though rapidly. But, this morning, many 
linger as buds, while others peer up, in half- 
expanded beauty, beneath the lifted leaves, 
frolicsome as Pucks or baby-nymphs. As 
you raise the leaf, in such cases, it is impos- 
sible not to imagine that a pair of tiny hands 
have upheld it, and that the pretty head will 
dip down again, and disappear. Others, 
again, have expanded all but the inmost pair 
of white petals, and these spring apart at the 
first touch of the finger on the stem. Some 
spread vast vases of fragrance, six or seven 
inches in diameter, while others are small 
and delicate, with petals like fine lace-work. 
Smaller still, we sometimes pass a flotilla of 
infant leaves, an inch in diameter. All these 
grow from the dark water, — and the blacker 
it is, the fairer their whiteness shows. But 
your eye follows the stem often vainly into 
those sombre depths, and vainly seeks to be- 
73 



Water-Lilies 

hold Sabrina fair, sitting with her twisted 
braids of Hhes, beneath the glassy, cool, but 
not translucent wave. Do not start, when, in 
such an effort, only your ow^n dreamy face 
looks back upon you, beyond the gunwale of 
the reflected boat, and you find that you float 
double — self and shadow. 

Let us rest our paddles, and look round us, 
while the idle motion sways our light skiff on- 
ward, now half embayed among the lily-pads, 
now lazily gliding over intervening gulfs. 
There is a great deal going on in these waters 
and their fringing woods and meadows. All 
the summer long the pond is bordered with 
successive walls of flowers. In early spring 
emerge the yellow catkins of the swamp- 
willow, first ; then the long tassels of the 
graceful alders expand and droop, till they 
weep their yellow dust upon the water; 
then come the birch-blossoms, more tardily ; 
then the downy leaves and white clusters of 
the medlar or shad-bush {AuuiajicJiicr Cana- 
densis) ; these dropping, the roseate chalices 
of the mountain-laurel open ; as they fade 
into melancholy brown, the sweet Azalea 
uncloses ; and before its last honeyed blossom 
has trailed down, dying, from the stem, the 
more fragrant Clethra starts out above, the 
74 



Water-Lilies 

button-bush thrusts forth its merry face amid 
wild roses, and the Clematis waves its sprays 
of beauty. Mingled with these grow, lower, 
the spiraeas, white and pink, yellow touch- 
me-not, fresh white arrowhead, bright blue 
vervain and skull-cap, dull snake-head, gay 
monkey-flower, coarse eupatoriums, milk- 
weeds, golden-rods, asters, thistles, and a host 
beside. Beneath, the brilliant scarlet cardinal- 
flower begins to palisade the moist shores ; and 
after its superb reflection has passed away 
from the waters, the grotesque witch-hazel 
flares out its narrow yellow petals amidst the 
October leaves, and so ends the floral year. 
There is not a week during all these months 
when one cannot stand in the boat and 
wreathe garlands of blossoms from the 
shores. 

These all crowd around the brink, and 
watch, day and night, the opening and clos- 
ing of the water-liHes. Meanwhile, upon the 
waters, our queen keeps her chosen court, 
nor can one of these mere land-loving blos- 
soms touch the hem of her garment. In 
truth, she bears no sister near her throne. 
There is but this one species among us, 
Nymphcea odorata, the beautiful little rose- 
colored iV^;;////^^^ i-^;/^///;^^(^, which still adorns 
75 



Water-Lilies 

the Botanic Gardens, being merely an occa- 
sional variety. She has, indeed, an EngHsh 
half-sister, Nymphcea alba, less beautiful, less 
fragrant, but keeping more fashionable hours, 
— not opening (according to Linnaeus) till 
seven, nor closing till four. And ^he has a 
humble cousin, the yellow Nuphar, who 
keeps commonly aloof, as becomes a poor 
relation, though created from the self-same 
mud, — a fact which Hawthorne has beauti- 
fully moralized. The prouder Nelumbium, 
a second-cousin, lineal descendant of the 
sacred bean of Pythagoras, has fallen to an 
obscurer position, but dwells, like a sturdy 
democrat, in the Y^x West. 

Yet, undisturbed, the water-lily reigns on, 
with her retinue around her. The tall pick- 
erel-weed (Pontederia) is her gentleman- 
usher, gorgeous in blue and gold through 
July, somewhat rusty in August. The water- 
shield (Hydropeltis) is chief maid-of-honor ; 
a high-born lady she, not without royal blood, 
indeed, but with rather a bend sinister; not 
precisely beautiful, but very fastidious ; en- 
cased over her whole person with a gelatinous 
covering, literally a starched duenna. Some- 
times she is suspected of conspiring to drive 
her mistress from the throne; for we have 

76 



Water-Lilies 

observed certain slow watercourses where the 
leaves of the water-lily have been almost 
wholly replaced, in a series of years, by the 
similar, but smaller, leaves of the water- 
shield. More rarely seen is the slender 
Utricularia, a dainty maiden, whose Hght 
feet scarce touch the water, — with the still 
more delicate floating white Water-Ranuncu- 
lus, and the shy Villarsia, whose submerged 
flowers merely peep one day above the 
surface and then close again forever. Then 
there are many humbler attendants, Potamo- 
getons or pond-weeds. And here float little 
emissaries from the dominions of land ; for 
the fallen florets of the Viburnum drift among 
the lily-pads, with mast-like stamens erect, 
sprinkling the water with a strange beauty, 
and cheating us with the promise of a new 
aquatic flower. 

These arc the still life of this sequestered 
nook ; but it is in fact a crowded thorough- 
fare. No tropic jungle more swarms with 
busy existence than these midsummer waters 
and their bushy banks. The warm and hum- 
ming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging 
from the murmur of invisible gnats and 
midges to the impetuous whirring of the 
great Libellulse, large almost as swallows, 
77 



Water- Lilies 

and hawking high in air for their food. Swift 
butterflies glance by, moths flutter, flies buzz, 
grasshoppers and katydids pipe their shrill 
notes, sharp as the edges of the sunbeams. 
Busy bees go humming past, straight as ar- 
rows, express-freight-trains from one blos- 
soming copse to another. Showy wasps of 
many species fume uselessly about, in gallant 
uniforms, wasting an immense deal of unne- 
cessary anger on the sultry universe. Grace- 
ful, stingless Sphexes and Ichneumon-flies 
emulate their bustle, without their weapons. 
Delicate lady-birds come and go to the milk- 
weeds, spotted almost as regularly as if 
Nature had decided to number the species, 
like policemen or hack-drivers, from one to 
twenty. Elegant little Leptura^ fly with them, 
so gay and airy they hardly seem like beetles. 
PhryganesE (once caddis-worms), lacc-flies, 
and long-tailed Ephemera: flutter more heavily 
by. On the large aldcr-flowers clings the 
superb Dcsnioccrus palliatus, beautiful as a 
tropical insect, with his steel-blue armor and 
his golden cloak {palliuni) above his shoul- 
ders, grandest knight on this Field of the 
Cloth of Gold. The countless fireflies which 
spangled the evening mist now only crawl 
sleepily, daylight creatures, with the lustre 

78 



Water- Lilies 

buried in their milky bodies. More wholly 
children of night, the soft, luxurious Sphinxes 
(or hawk-moths) come not here ; fine ladies 
of the insect world, their home is among 
gardens and greenhouses, late and languid 
by day, but all night long upon the wing, 
dancing in the air with unwearied muscles 
till long past midnight, and supping on 
honey at last. They come not; but the 
nobler butterflies soar above us, stoop a mo- 
ment to the water, and then with a few lazy 
wavings of their sumptuous wings float far 
over the oak-trees to the woods they love. 

All these hover near the water-lily ; but its 
special parasites are an enamelled beetle 
{Donacia metallica) which keeps house per- 
manently in the flower, and a few smaller ones 
which tenant the surface of the leaves, — 
larva, pupa, and perfect insect, forty feeding 
like one, and each leading its whole earthly 
career on this floating island of perishable 
verdure. The "beautiful blue damsel-flies" 
alight also in multitudes among them, so fear- 
less that they perch with equal readiness on 
our boat or paddle, and so various that two 
adjacent ponds will sometimes be haunted by 
two distinct sets of species. In the water, 
among the leaves, little shining whirlwigs 
79 



Water- Lilies 

wheel round and round, fifty joining in the 
dance, till, at the slightest alarm, they whirl 
away to some safer ball-room, and renew the 
merriment. On every floating log, as we ap- 
proach it, there is a convention of turtles, 
sitting in calm debate, like mailed barons, till, 
as we draw near, they plump into the water, 
and paddle away for some subaqueous Run- 
nymede. Beneath, the shy and stately pick- 
erel vanishes at a glance, shoals of minnows 
glide, black and bearded pouts frisk aimlessly, 
soft water-newts hang poised without motion, 
and slender pickerel-frogs cease occasionally 
their submerged croaking, and, darting to 
the surface, with swift vertical strokes, gulp 
a mouthful of fresh air, and down again to 
renew the moist soliloquy. 

Time would fail us to tell of the feathered 
life around us, — the blackbirds that build 
securely in these thickets, the stray swallows 
that dip their wings in the quiet waters, and 
the kingfishers that still bring, as the ancients 
fabled, halcyon days. Yonder stands, against 
the shore, a bittern, motionless in that wreath 
of mist which makes his long-logged person 
almost as dim as his far-off booming by 
night. There poises a hawk, before sweep- 
ing down to some chosen bough in the dense 
80 



Water- Lilies 

forest; and there flies a pair of blue-jays, 
screaming, from tree to tree. As for wild 
quadrupeds, the race is almost passed away. 
Far to the north, indeed, the great moose 
still browses on the lily-pads, and the shy 
beaver nibbles them ; but here the few linger- 
ing four-footed creatures only haunt, but do 
not graze upon, these floating pastures. Eyes 
more favored than ours may yet chance to 
spy an otter in this still place ; there by the 
shore are the small footprints of a mink; 
that dark thing disappearing in the waters 
yonder, a soft mass of drowned fur, is a 
muskrat, or " musquash." Later in the sea- 
son, a mound of earth will be his winter 
dwelling-place ; and these myriad muscle- 
shells at the water's edge are the remnant 
of his banquets, — once banquets for the 
Indians, too. 

But we must return to our lilies. There is 
no sense of wealth like floating in this archi- 
pelago of white and green. The emotions of 
avarice become almost demoralizing. Every 
flower bears a fragrant California in its bo- 
som, and you feel impoverished at the thought 
of leaving one behind. Then, after the first 
half-hour of eager grasping, one becomes 
fastidious, rather avoids those on which the 
6 8i 



Water- Lilies 

wasps and flies have alighted, and seeks only 
the stainless. But handle them tenderly, as 
if you loved them. Do not grasp at the 
open flower as if it were a peony or a holly- 
hock, for then it will come ofl", stalkless, in 
your hand, and you will cast it blighted upon 
the water ; but coil your thumb and second 
finger affectionately around it, press the ex- 
tended forefinger firmly to the stem below, 
and, with one steady pull, you will secure a 
long and delicate stalk, fit to twine around 
the graceful head of your beloved, as the 
Hindoo goddess of beauty encircled with a 
Lotus the brow of Rama. 

Consider the lilies. All over our rural 
watercourses, at midsummer, float these cups 
of snow. They are Nature's symbols of cool- 
ness. They suggest to us the white garments 
of their Oriental worshippers. They come 
with the white roses, and prepare the way for 
the white lilies of the garden. The white doe 
of Rylstone and Andrew Marvell's fawn might 
fitly bathe amid their beauties. Yonder steep 
bank slopes down to the lake-side, one solid 
mass of pale pink laurel, but, once upon the 
water, a purer tint prevails. The pink fades 
into a lingering flush, and the white creature 
floats peerless, set in green without and gold 
82 



Water-Lilies 

within. That bright circle of stamens is the 
very ring with which Doges once wedded the 
Adriatic ; Venice has lost it, but it dropped 
into the water-lily's bosom, and there it rests 
forever. So perfect in form, so redundant in 
beauty, so delicate, so spotless, so fragrant, — 
what presumptuous lover ever dared, in his 
most enamoured hour, to liken his mistress to 
a water-lily? No human Blanche or LiHan 
was ever so fair as that. 

The water-lily comes of an ancient and 
sacred family of white-robed priests. They 
assisted at the most momentous religious 
ceremonies, from the beginning of recorded 
time. The Egyptian Lotus was a sacred 
plant; it was dedicated to Harpocrates and 
to the god Nofr Atmoo, — Nofr meaning 
goody whence the name of our yellow lily, 
Nuphar. But the true Egyptian flower was 
NympJicea Lotus, though NympJicea coerulea, 
Moore's " blue water-lilies," can be traced on 
the sculptures also. It was cultivated in tanks 
in the gardens ; it was the chief material for 
festal wreaths ; a single bud hung over the 
forehead of many a queenly dame ; and the 
sculptures represent the weary flowers as 
dropping from the heated hands of belles, in 
the later hours of the feast. Rock softly on 

83 



Water- Lilies 

the waters, fair lilies ! your Eastern kindred 
have rocked on the stormier bosom of Cleo- 
patra. The Egyptian Lotus was, moreover, 
the emblem of the sacred Nile, — as the 
Hindoo species, of the sacred Ganges; and 
each was held the symbol of the creation of 
the world from the waters. The sacred bull 
Apis was wreathed with its garlands; there 
were niches for water, to place it among 
tombs ; it was carved in the capitals of 
columns ; it was represented on plates and 
vases ; the sculptures show it in many sacred 
uses, even as a burnt-offering; Isis holds it; 
and the god Nilus still binds a wreath of 
water-lilies around the throne of Memnon. 

From Egypt the Lotus was carried to As- 
syria, and Layard found it among fir-cones 
and honeysuckles on the later sculptures of 
Nineveh. The Greeks dedicated it to the 
nymphs, whence the name NympJicea. Nor 
did the Romans disregard it, though the 
Lotus to which Ovid's nymph Lotis was 
changed, servato nomine, was a tree, and not 
a flower. Still different a thing was the en- 
chanted stem of the Lotus-eaters of Herodo- 
tus, which prosaic botanists have reduced 
to the ZizypJins Lotus found by Mungo Park, 
translating also the yellow Lotus-dust into 
84 



Water-Lilies 

a mere " farina, tasting like sweet ginger- 
bread." 

But in the Lotus of Hindostan we find our 
flower again, and the Oriental sacred books 
are cool with water-lilies. Open the Vishnu 
Purana at any page, and it is a Sortes Liliance, 
The orb of the earth is Lotus-shaped, and is 
upborne by the tusks of Vesava, as if he had 
been sporting in a lake where the leaves and 
blossoms float. Brahma, first incarnation of 
Vishnu, creator of the world, was born from 
a Lotus ; so was Sri or Lakshmu, the Hindoo 
Venus, goddess of beauty and prosperity, 
protectress of womanhood, whose worship 
guards the house from all danger. *' Seated 
on a full-blown Lotus, and holding a Lotus 
in her hand, the goddess Sri, radiant with 
beauty, rose from the waves." The Lotus is 
the chief ornament of the subterranean Eden, 
Patala, and the holy mountain Meru is 
thought to be shaped like its seed-vessel, 
larger at summit than at base. When the 
heavenly Urvasi fled from her earthly spouse, 
Puruvavas, he found her sporting with four 
nymphs of heaven, in a lake beautified with 
the Lotus. When the virtuous Prahlada was 
burned at the stake, he cried to his cruel 
father, *' The fire burneth me not, and all 
8s 



Water- Lilies 

around I behold the face of the sky, cool and 
fragrant with beds of Lotus-flowers ! " Above 
all, the graceful history of the transformations 
of Krishna is everywhere hung with these 
fresh chaplets. Every successive maiden 
whom the deity wooes is Lotus-eyed, Lotus- 
mouthed, or Lotus-cheeked, and the youthful 
hero wears always a Lotus-wreath. Also 
" the clear sky was bright with the autumnal 
moon, and the air fragrant with the perfume 
of the wild water-lily, in whose buds the 
clustering bees were murmuring their song." 

Elsewhere we find fuller details. *' In the 
primordial state of the world, the rudimentary 
universe, submerged in water, reposed on the 
bosom of the Eternal. Brahma, the architect 
of the world, poised on a Lotus-leaf, floated 
upon the waters, and all that he was able to 
discern with his eight eyes was water and 
darkness. Amid scenes so ungenial and dis- 
mal, the god sank into a profound reverie, 
when he thus soliloquized: 'Who am I? 
Whence am I ? ' In this state of abstraction 
Brahma continued during the period of a 
century and a half of the gods, without ap- 
parent benefit or a solution of his inquiries, — 
a circumstance which caused him great un- 
easiness of mind." It is a comfort, however, 
86 



Water-Lilies 

to know that subsequently a voice came to 
him, on which he rose, " seated himself upon 
the Lotus in an attitude of contemplation, 
and reflected upon the Eternal, who soon 
appeared to him in the form of a man with a 
thousand heads," — a questionable exchange 
for his Lotus-solitude. 

This is Brahminism ; but the other great 
form of Oriental religion has carried the same 
fair symbol with it. One of the Bibles of the 
Buddhists is named '* The White Lotus of the 
Good Law." A pious Nepaulese bowed in 
reverence before a vase of lilies which per- 
fumed the study of Sir William Jones. At 
sunset in Thibet, the French missionaries tell 
us, every inhabitant of every village pros- 
trates himself in the public square, and the 
holy invocation, " Oh, the gem in the Lotus ! " 
goes murmuring over hill and valley, like the 
sound of many bees. It is no unmeaning 
phrase, but an utterance of ardent desire to 
be absorbed into that Brahma whose em- 
blem is the sacred flower. This mystic for- 
mula or " mani " is imprinted on the pavement 
of the streets, it floats on flags from the 
temples, and the wealthy Buddhists maintain 
sculptor-missionaries, Old Mortalities of the 
water-lily, who, wandering to distant lands, 

87 



Water-Lilles 

carve the blessed words upon cliff and 
stone. 

Having got thus far into Orientalism, we 
can hardly expect to get out again without 
some slight entanglement in philology. Lily- 
pads. Wh^ncQ pads? No other leaf is iden- 
tified with that singular monosyllable. Has 
our floating Lotus-leaf any connection with 
padding, or with a footpad ? with the ambling 
pad of an abbot, or a paddle, or a paddock, 
or a padlock? with many-domed Padua 
proud, or with St. Patrick? Is the name 
derived from the Anglo-Saxon paad or pet- 
thian, or the Greek Trareo)? The etymol- 
ogists are silent; but was there ever a 
philological trouble for which the Sanscrit 
could not afford at least a conjectural cure? 
A dictionary of that venerable tongue is an 
ostrich's stomach, which can crack the hard- 
est etymological nut. The Sanscrit name for 
the Lotus is simply Padina. The learned 
Brahmins call the Egyptian deities Padma 
Devi, or Lotus-Gods; the second of the 
eighteen Hindoo Puranas is styled the Padma 
Purana, because it treats of the " epoch when 
the world was a golden Lotus ; " and the 
sacred incantation which goes murmuring 
through Thibet is **^0m mani padme houm." 



Water- Lilies 

It would be singular, if upon these delicate 
floating leaves a fragment of our earliest ver- 
nacular has been borne down to us, so that 
here the school-boy is more learned than 'the 
philologists. 

This lets us down easily to the more famil- 
iar uses of this plant divine. By the Nile, in 
early days, the w^ater-lily was good not merely 
for devotion, but for diet. " From the seeds 
of the Lotus," said Pliny, " the Egyptians 
make bread." The Hindoos still eat the 
seeds, roasted in sand ; also the stalks and 
roots. In South America, from the seeds of 
the Victoria {^Nymphcea Victoria, now Victoria 
Regia) a farina is made, preferred to that of 
the finest wheat, — Bonpland even suggesting 
to our reluctant imagination Victoria-pies. 
But the European species are used, so far as 
is reported, only in dyeing, and as food (if 
the truth be told) of swine. Our own water- 
lily is rather more powerful in its uses ; the 
root contains tannin and gallic acid, and a 
decoction of it " gives a black precipitate, 
with sulphate of iron." It graciously con- 
sents to become an astringent and a styptic, 
and a poultice, and, banished from all other 
temples, still lingers in those of ^Esculapius. 

The botanist also finds his special satisfac- 
89 



Water-Lilies 

tions in the flower. It has some strange 
peculiarities of structure. So loose is the 
internal distribution of its tissues, that it was 
for some time held doubtful to which of the 
two great vegetable divisions, exogenous or 
endogenous, it belonged. Its petals, more- 
over, furnish the best example of the gradual 
transition of petals into stamens, — illus- 
trating that wonderful law of identity which 
is the great discovery of modern science. 
Every child knows this peculiarity of the 
water-lily, but the extent of it seems to vary 
with season and locality, and sometimes one 
finds a succession of flowers almost entirely 
free from this confusion of organs. 

The reader may not care to learn that the 
order of Nymphaeaceae " differs from Ranun- 
culaceae in the consolidation of its carpels, 
from Papaveraceae in the placentation not 
being parietal, and from Nelumbiaceae in the 
want of a large truncated disc containing 
monospermous achenia ; " but they may like 
to know that the water-lily has relations on 
land, in all gradations of society, from poppy 
to magnolia, and yet does not conform its 
habits precisely to those of any of them. Its 
great black roots, sometimes as large as a 
man's arm, form a network at the bottom of 
90 



Water-Lilles 

the water. Its stem floats, an airy four-celled 
tube, adapting itself to the depth, and stiff in 
shallows, like the stalk of the yellow lily; 
and it contracts and curves downward when 
seed-time approaches. The leaves show be- 
neath the magnifier beautiful adaptations of 
structure. They are not, like those of land- 
plants, constructed with deep veins to receive 
the rain and conduct it to the stem, but are 
smooth and glossy, and of even surface. The 
leaves of land-vegetation have also thousands 
of little breathing-pores, principally on the 
under side: the apple-leaf, for instance, has 
twenty-four thousand to the square inch. 
But here they are fewer ; they are wholly on 
the upper side, and, whereas in other cases 
they open or shut according to the moisture 
of the atmosphere, here the greedy leaves, 
secure of moisture, scarcely deign to close 
them. Nevertheless, even these give some 
recognition of hygrometric necessities, and, 
though living on the water, and not merely 
christened with dewdrops like other leaves, 
but baptized by immersion all the time, they 
are yet known to suffer in drought and to 
take pleasure in the rain. 

After speaking of the various kindred of 
the water-lily, it would be wrong to leave our 
91 



Water- Lilies 

modest species without due mention of its 
rarest and most magnificent relative, at first 
claimed even as its twin sister, and classed as 
a Nymphaea. I once lived near neighbor to 
a Victoria Regia. Nothing in the world of 
vegetable existence has such a human inter- 
est. The charm is not in the mere size of 
the plant, which disappoints everybody, as 
Niagara does, when tried by that sole stand- 
ard. The leaves of the Victoria, indeed, at- 
tain a diameter of six feet ; the largest flowers, 
of twenty-three inches, — four times the size 
of the largest of our water-lilies. But it is 
not the measurements of the Victoria, it is its 
life which fascinates. It is not a thing merely 
of dimensions, nor merely of beauty, but a 
creature of vitality and motion. Those vast 
leaves expand and change almost visibly. 
They have been known to grow half an inch 
an hour, eight inches a day. Rising one day 
from the water, a mere clenched mass of 
yellow prickles, a leaf is transformed the next 
day to a crimson salver, gorgeously tinted on 
its upturned rim. Then it spreads into a raft 
of green, armed with long thorns, and sup- 
ported by a framework of ribs and crosspieces, 
an inch thick, and so substantial that the 
Brazil Indians, while gathering the seed- 
92 



Water-Lilies 

vessels, place their young children on the 
leaves ; — yrtcpe, or water-platter, they call 
the accommodating plant. But even these 
expanding leaves are not the glory of the 
Victoria ; the glory is in the opening of the 
flower. 

I have sometimes looked in, for a passing 
moment, at the greenhouse, its dwelling-place, 
during the period of flowering, — and then 
stayed for more than an hour, unable to 
leave the fascinating scene. After the strange 
flower-bud has reared its dark head from the 
placid tank, moving it a little, uneasily, like 
^om.Q imprisoned water-creature, it pauses for 
I moment in a sort of dumb despair. Then, 
trembling again, and collecting all its powers, 
it thrusts open, with an indignant jerk, the 
rough calyx-leaves ; and the beautiful dis- 
robing begins. The firm, white, central cone, 
once so closely infolded, quivers a little, and 
swiftly, before your eyes, the first of the hun- 
dred petals detaches its delicate edges, and 
springs back, opening towards the water, 
while Its white reflection opens to meet it 
from below. Many moments of repose follow, 
— you watch, — another petal trembles, de- 
taches, springs open, and is still. Then 
another, and another, and another. Each 
93 



Water- Lilies 

movement is so quiet, yet so emphatic, so 
living, so human, that the radiant creature 
seems a Musidora of the water, and you 
almost blush with a sense of guilt, in gazing 
on that peerless privacy. As petal by petal 
slowly opens, there still stands the central 
cone of snow, a glacier, an alp, a Jungfrau, 
while each avalanche of whiteness seems the 
last. Meanwhile a strange, rich odor fills the 
air, and Nature seems to concentrate all fas- 
cinations and claim all senses for this jubilee 
of her darling. 

So pass the enchanted moments of the 
evening, till the fair thing pauses at last, and 
remains for hours unchanged. In the morn- 
ing, one by one, those white petals close 
again, shutting all their beauty in, and you 
watch through the short sleep for the period 
of waking. Can this bright, transfigured 
creature appear again in the same chaste 
loveliness? Your fancy can scarcely trust it, 
fearing some disastrous change ; and your 
fancy is too true a prophet. Come again, 
after the second day's opening, and you start 
at the transformation which one hour * has 
secretly produced. Can this be the virgin 
Victoria, — this thing of crimson passion, this 
pile of pink and yellow, relaxed, expanding, 
94 



Water- Lilies 

voluptuous, lolling languidly upon the water, 
never to rise again? In this short time every 
tint of every petal is transformed ; it is gor- 
geous in beauty, but it is ** Hebe turned to 
Magdalen." 

Such is the Victoria Regia. But our rustic 
water-lily, our innocent Nymphaea, never 
claiming such a hot-house glory, never droop- 
ing into such a blush, blooms on placidly in 
the quiet waters, till she modestly folds her 
leaves for the last time, and bows her head 
beneath the surface forever. Next year she 
lives for us only in her children, fair and pure 
as herself. 

Nay, not alone in them, but also in memory. 
The fair vision will not fade from us, though 
the paddle has dipped its last crystal drop 
from the waves, and the boat is drawn upon 
the shore. We may yet visit many lovely 
and lonely places, — meadows thick with 
violet, or the homes of the shy Rhodora, or 
those sloping forest-haunts where the slight 
Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads, — but no 
scene will linger on our vision like this annual 
Feast of the Lilies. On scorching mountains, 
amid raw prairie-winds, or upon the regal 
ocean, the white pageant shall come back to 
memory again, with all the luxury of summer 
95 



Water-Lilies 

heats, and all the fragrant coolness that can 
relieve them. We shall fancy ourselves 
again among these fleets of anchored lilies, 
— again, like Urvasi, sporting amid the Lake 
of Lotuses. 

For that which is remembered is often 
more vivid than that which is seen. The eye 
paints better in the presence, the heart in the 
absence, of the object most dear. " He who 
longs after beautiful Nature can best describe 
her," said Bettine Brentano ; *' he who is in 
the midst of her loveliness can only lie down 
and enjoy." It enhances the truth of the 
poet's verses, that he writes them in his study. 
Absence is the very air of passion, and all 
the best description is in mcmoriani. As with 
our human beloved, when the graceful pres- 
ence is with us, we cannot analyze or describe, 
but merely possess, and only after its depar- 
ture can it be portrayed by our yearning 
desires ; so is it with Nature : only in losing 
her do we gain the power to describe her, 
and we are introduced to Art, as we are to 
Eternity, by the dropping away of our 
companions. 



96 



INDEX OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS 
MENTIONED 



Adder's-Tongue Arethusa, 21. 

Alder, 5, 15, 22, 36, 37, 67, 78. 

Almond, 40. 

A mela7ichier Canadensis, 55, 74. 

A7idroineda polifolia, 47. 

Anemone, 11, 39, 40, 42, 50. 

Anemone, Blue, 37. 

Anemone, Rue-Leaved, 40. 

A nemotie t/mliciroides, 40. 

Ant, 3. 

Apple, 34, 59. 

Aquilegia, 51. 

Arbor Vitce, 61. 

Arbutus, Trailing, 37. See 

Epigaea. 
Arethusa, 46, 49. 
Aronia, 55. 
Arrowhead, 75. 
Aster, 22, 26, 27, 49, 75. 
Azalea, 19, 29, 51, 74. 
Azalea, Pink, 18, 47. 

Bead-Ruby, 52. 
Beaver, 81. 
Bee, 78. 

Beech, 27, 35, 52, S3- 
Beetle, 55, 78. 
Bellwort, ii, 42, 50. 
Birch, 27, 37, 54, 69, 74. 
Bishop's Cap, ii. 
Bittern, 80. 
Blackbird, 34, 67, 80. 
Blackbird, Red-Winged, 43. 
Bladder-Wort, 26. 
Blethisa qnadricollis, 48. 
Bloodroot, 8, 9, 10, 42, 45, 50. 
Blue Anemone, 7. 
Bluebird, 34, 36, 43, 57, 58. 
Blue-Eyed Grass, 50. 
Blue-jay, 81. 
Bobolink, 58. 
Buckbean, 14. 
Bull-frog, 36. 
Burdock, 45. 
Buttercup, 17, 45. 
Butterfly, 78, 79. 
Button-Bush, 75. 



Caddis-worm, 55, 67, 68, 78. 
Calla, Ethiopic, 14. 
Calla, Wild, 14. 
Calopogon, 21. 
Campanula, 50. 
Canker-moth, 55. 
Carabus, 48. 

Cardinal-Flower, 24, 25, 46, 75. 
Cat-bird, 58. 
Celandine, 45. 
Cherry, 40. 
Chestnut, 53, 69, 70. 
Chickweed, 42, 45. 
Chipping-sparrow, 59. 
Christmas Rose, 5. 
Chrysanthemu7n leticanthemunt^ 

51- 
Cicindela rugi/rons, 48. 
Cinquefoil, 11, 42, 50. 
Cinquefoil, Mountain, 24. 
Cistus, 36, 49. 
Claytonia, 8, 42. 
Clematis, 25, 49, 75. 
Clethra, 47, 49. 74- 
Clintonia, 11, 46. 
Clover, 17, 29. 
Colt's-foot, 4. 
Columbine, 50. 
Convallaria, 50. 
Cool- Wort, 52. 
Corallorhiza verna, 48. 
Cornel, Dwarf, 14, 17. 
Cornel-tree, 13. 
Cornus yiorida, 46. 
Corj'dalis, 12. 
Corydalis, White, 42, 47. 
Cowslip, 10, 42, 51. 
Cowslip (English), 51. 
Cricket, 36. 
Crocus, 42. 
Cucumber-Root, 50. 
Cupid's Tears, 3. 
Cypripedium, 16, 48. 
Cypripedium parvifloncm^ 17. 
Cypripedium, Yellow, 47. 

Daffodil, 43. 



97 



Index 



Daisy, 43. 

Damsel-fly, 79. 
Dandelion, 10, 20, 42, 45. 
Desmocerus palliattis, 78. 
Diervilla, 51. 
Doe, 82. 

Donacia vtetallica, 79. 
Dor-bug, 67. 
Draccena borealis, 48. 
Dragon-fly, 68. 
Duck, Wild, 68. 
Dutchman's Breeches, 12, 47. 
Dytiscus, 67. 

Easter-flower, 40. 
Elm, 34, 52, S3, 55. 
Ephemera, 78. 
Epigaea,4i, 43. 67. 
EpigcBa repefis, 37, 38. 
Equisetum, 45. 
Eupatorium, 75. 

Fair Maid of February, 43. 

Fawn, 82. 

Fern, 45. 

Fern, Maidenhair, 27. 

Fir-cones, 84. 

Fire-fly, 14, 78. 

Flicker, 55. 

Fly, 78, 82. 

Fringe-cup, 52. 

Frog, 56. 

Gay-Wings, 11, 52. 
Gentian, 46, 50. 
Gentian, Barrel, 26. 
Geranium, 49. 
Geranium, Wild, 17. 
Gerris, 55, 67. 
Ginseng, 11. 
Ginseng, Dwarf, 47. 
Gnat, 77. 
Gold Thread, 50. 
Golden-rod, 22, 24, 27, 75. 
Grape-vine, 27, 53, 67. 
Grasshopper, 36, 78. 
Grub, 59. 

Hair-bird, 59. 
Harebell, 21, 50. 
Hawk, 34, 80. 
Hawk-moth, 79. 
Hawkweed, 21. 
Hazel, 34. 
Hellebore, 5. 
Hellebore, American, 45, 
Hellno prceusta, 48. 
Hemlock, 53. 



98 



Hepatica triloba^ 6, 7, 37, 38, 39 

41, 42, 43. SO- 
Hobble-Bush, 11. 
Hollyhock, 82. 
Honeysuckle, 51, 84. 
Horia, 48. 
Hottonia, 46. 
Houstonia, 11, 20, 42. 
Humming-bird, 3, 45. 
Hyacinth, 15, 43. 
Hydropeltis, 76. 
Hylas, 36. 

Ichneumon-fly, 78. 
Iris, 49. 

Jonquil, 43. 

Katydid, 36, 78. 
King-bird, 15, 
Kingfisher, 80. 

Labrador Tea, 12. 

Lace-fly, 78. 

Ladies Tresses, 26, 50. 

Lady-bird, 78. 

Lady's-Slipper, 16. 

Land-lizards, 57. 

Laurel, 19, 50, 60, 82. 

Laurel, Ground, 37. 

Laurel, Mountain, 18, 74. 

Ledum, 12. 

Leptura, 78. 

Libellula, 77. 

Life-Everlasting, 24. 

Lily, 50, 82. 

Lily-of-the-Valley, Wild, 11. 

Lily, Meadow, 22, 23, 24. 

Lily, Pond. See Lily, Water. 

Lily, Water, 15, 20, 26, 67, 95. 

Lily, Yellow, 83, 91. 

Linnaja, 12, 47, 49, 95. 

Liverleaf, 37, 50. 

Liverwort, 7, 37. 

Lobelia, 49. 

Lonicera, 51. 

Loosestrife, 21. 

Lotus, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89. 

Lotus, Zizyphus, 84. 

Lousewort, 50. 

Lupine, 15. 

Maidenhair Fern, 27. 
Maple, 14, 27, 53, 54. 
Marsh-Marigold, 11, 43. 
Marsh-Marigold (English), 51. 
Mayflower {see also Epigaea), 6, 7, 
36, 37. 38, 39» 45, 50. 



Index 



May- Wings, 52. 

Meadow-Sweet, 23. 

Medeola, 50. 

Medlar, 74. 

Me7iya7ithes trifoliata^ 14. 

Midge, 77. 

Milkweed, 27, 75. 

Mink, 81. 

Minnow, 80. 

Miskodeed, 8. 

Mitella, 11. 

Moccason-Flower, 16. 

Moccason-Flower, Yellow, 17. 

Monkey-Flower, 24, 75. 

Moose, 81. 

Moss, Feather, 9. 

Moth, 78. 

Mouse-ear, 42. 

Mullein, 45. 

Muskrat or Musquash, 68, 81. 

Narcissus, 43. 

Nelumbiaces, 90. 

Nelumbium, 76. 

Neottia (now Spiranthes), 50. 

Newt, Water, 55, 56, 80. 

Nightshade, 45. 

Notonecta, 55, 67. 
-^ Nuphar, 76, 83. 
^ Nymphasa, 84, 92, 95. 
^ Nymph^eacea^, 90. 

, NyniphcEa alba, 76. 
mJ NymphcBa ccerulea, 83. 

Nymphcea Lotus, 83. 

Nyinphcea odorata, 75. 

Ny})iphcBa saiiguiiiea, 75. 

Nymphcea Victoria, 89. 

Oak, 34, 35, 53, 57. 
Omophron, 48. 
Orchid, 16, 17. 
Orchis, 21. 

Orchis s/>ectabilis, 48. 
Osmunda, 45. 
Otter, 81. 

Paiiagoeus fasciatiis , 48. 
Papaveraceae, 90. 
Pasque-flower, 40. 
Pedicularis, 50. 
Peony, 82. 
Phryganea, 78. 
Pickerel, 80. 
Pickerel- Frog, 80. 
Pickerel-Weed, 26, 76. 
Pine, 53, 61. 
Pitch- Pine, 53. 
Plantain, 46. 



Pogonia, 21. 
Polygala, n, 26. 
Pond-weed, 77. 
Pontederia, 76. 
Potamogetons, 77. 
Potentilla, 50. 
Pout, 80. 

Primrose, 5, 21, 51. 
Primrose (English), 51. 
Primrose, Evening, 36. 
Pulsatilla, 40. 

Ranunculaceae, 90. 

Raspberry, 27, 44. 

Reed, Water, 68. 

Rhexia, 46,48. 

Rhododendron, 12, ig. 

Rhodora, 13, 46, 47, 49, 95. 

Robin, 34, 36, 51, 57. 

Rock-Tripe, 50. 

Rose, White, 82. 

Rose, Wild, 21, 23, 75. 

Rush, Horsetail or Scouring, 45. 

Salamander, 56, 57. 

Sanguinaria, 47, 50. 

Saxifrage, n, 42. 

Scarlet Tanager, 18. 

Sea-Anemone, 62. 

Self-Heal, 50. 

Serpent, 57. 

Shad-bush or Shad-blow, 55, 74. 

Shad-spirit, 55. 

Sisyrinchimn anceps, 50. 

Skull-cap, 75. 

Snake, 56. 

Snake-head, 75. 

Snowdrop, 5, 42, 43. 

Solomon's-Seal, 17, 50. 

Sparrow, Chipping, 59. 

Sparrow, Field, 9. 

Sparrow, Song, 34, 36, 43, 57, 70. 

Sphcsroderus stetiostomus, 48. 

Sphex, 78. 

Sphinx, 79. 

Spider, 71. 

Spiraea, 23, 24, 49, 75. 

Spring-Beauty, 8, 42. 

Squirrel, 35, 57. 

Squirrel-Cup, 7, 52. 

Strawbell, 50. 

Strawberry, 11, 42. 

Swallow, 80. 

Sycamore, 59. 

Tadpole, 56, 67, 68. 
Thistle, 24, 45, 75. 
Thrush, 51. 



99 



Index 



Thrush, Red, 9. 
Tiarella, 11, 49. 
Toad, 36, 56. 
Toad, Tree, 36, 
Touch-me-not, 50, 75. 
Trailing-Arbutus, 50. 
Trientalis, 49. 
Trillium, Painted, n. 
Trillium, Red, n. 
Tritons, 56. 
Turtle, 55, 56, 68, 80. 

Umbilicaria, 50. 
Utricularia, 77. 
Uvularia, 50. 

Veery, 29. 

Veratrum, 45. 

Vervain, 24, 50, 75. 

Viburnum, 27, 77. 

Victoria Regia, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95. 

Villarsia, 77. 

Viola acuta, 48. 

Viola debilis, 46, 47. 

Viola rotund if olia, 42. 

Violet, II, 42, 43, 50, 95. 

Violet, Dog-Tooth, lo, 42. 

Violet, Yellow, ii, 17, 42,46. 



Walnut, 53, 54. 

Wasp, 78, 82. 

Water-Boatman, 55, 67. 

Water-Newt, 55, 56, 80. 

Water-Platter, 93. 

Water-Ranunculus, 77. 

Water- Shield, 76. 

Water-Skater, 55, 67. 

Waxwork, 27. 

Whippoorwill, 36. 

Whirlwig, 79. 

White Man's Footstep, 46. 

White-Pine, 53. 

Whiteweed, 45, 51. 

Wild Indigo, 21. 

Willow, 37. 

Willow, Swamp, 74. 

Wind-Flower, 40, 50. 

Witch-Hazel, 5, 26, 27, 35, 44, 75. 

Woodpecker, 59. 

Woodpecker, Golden-winged, 55. 

Yarrow, 45, 50. 
Yellow-bird, 58. 
Yellow-Throat, Maryland, 9. 
Yrupe, 93. 

Zizyphus Lotus., 84. 



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Introductory Note — Biographical Sketch by R. W. Emerson ^ The Service : 
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